Best music intros do something almost no other part of a song can do: they identify the track before a single word is sung. Two notes, one chord, a drum pattern, a synth loop — and everyone in the room knows what is coming. That instant recognition is why the best music intros of all time are argued about like sports records, and why a great opening can outlive the album it came from.
This is SoundMavericks’ ranked list of the 18 most iconic song intros ever recorded. It is a music editorial, not a lab test: we have weighed the consensus of decades of critics’ lists, countdowns and reader polls against our own ranking rationale — how fast an intro identifies the song, how original it sounded on release, and how deeply it has soaked into everyday culture through films, stadiums, adverts, ringtones and cover versions. If an intro can be recognised by someone who does not even like the band, it earned its place here.
What makes a song intro iconic?
Three things separate a merely good opening from one of the best song intros of all time. The first is a hook that works as a signature. The intro is not just the start of the arrangement; it becomes the song’s logo, the part guitar students learn first and quiz shows use as a two-second question. The second is recognisability under bad conditions — through a shop speaker, a car radio or a phone across a room, the shape of the riff or rhythm still reads clearly. The third is cultural footprint. The truly iconic intros escaped their records: they open films, soundtrack sporting moments, and get sampled, parodied and referenced by artists who were not born when they were recorded.
Notice what is not required: length or complexity. One entry below is a single chord. Another is four notes a beginner can play in their first week. Several are under five seconds before the vocal arrives. The common thread is economy — an idea so well judged that nothing can be removed from it.
Best music intros: the ranked list
1. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — Nirvana (1991, Nevermind)
Four clean guitar chords, played twice almost politely — then the drums detonate and the same chords return as a wall of distortion. That quiet-loud switch is the whole grunge era in about ten seconds, and it is why this tops our ranking of the best music intros. The riff is simple enough to be a slogan and the dynamic trick so effective that a generation of alternative bands copied it. Few intros have ever announced a cultural changing of the guard this clearly.
2. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” — Guns N’ Roses (1987, Appetite for Destruction)
Slash’s bright, circling guitar figure — famously begun as a warm-up exercise — is the most singable hard-rock intro ever written. It sparkles where the band behind it snarls, and that contrast carries the song’s tenderness-versus-danger theme before Axl Rose sings a note. It remains the benchmark against which every melodic rock intro is measured, and it still stops conversations in guitar shops worldwide.
3. “Stairway to Heaven” — Led Zeppelin (1971, Led Zeppelin IV)
Jimmy Page’s fingerpicked acoustic figure, joined by recorder-like woodwind tones, is the great slow-burn opening. Nothing about it shouts, yet the room goes quiet: the descending line feels ancient, half folk and half classical, and it promises the journey the song then takes for eight minutes. As an exercise in mood-setting rather than impact, it has never been beaten.
4. “Billie Jean” — Michael Jackson (1983, Thriller)
A dry drum-machine-tight beat, then one of the most famous basslines in pop walking in underneath. The intro to “Billie Jean” is pure tension: sparse, precise and slightly paranoid, exactly matching a lyric about denial and accusation. Producer Quincy Jones and Jackson fought to keep this long, patient build, and they were right — the groove is unmistakable within two bars, on any speaker, anywhere.
5. “A Hard Day’s Night” — The Beatles (1964, A Hard Day’s Night)
One chord — a crashing, jangling cluster from the band’s guitars and piano — and the song has already happened. The opening of “A Hard Day’s Night” may be the most analysed single sonority in pop: it is an intro, a statement of arrival and a piece of sound design in under three seconds. In 1964 nothing on the radio sounded like that chord, and the confidence of starting a record at full impact still feels modern.
6. “Baba O’Riley” — The Who (1971, Who’s Next)
Pete Townshend’s looping, minimalist synth sequence bubbles away alone before piano, drums and eventually Roger Daltrey’s voice pile in. It was genuinely futuristic in 1971 — electronic music smuggled into a rock anthem — and the long, patient build is why the eventual arrival of the full band feels like a sunrise. Television and film producers have borrowed that build for decades whenever a scene needs lift-off.
7. “Hotel California” — Eagles (1977, Hotel California)
Don Felder’s twelve-string guitar figure, all minor-key arpeggios and desert-at-dusk atmosphere, tells you the whole story before the first line about a dark desert highway. The intro is spacious and unhurried, with the reggae-tinged rhythm slipping in beneath, and it sets up the twin-guitar coda that bookends the song. Few openings establish a place as completely as this one does.
8. “Back in Black” — AC/DC (1980, Back in Black)
A muted guitar chug, a drum count that feels like a starting gun, and then that lean, swaggering riff. “Back in Black” is the masterclass in doing almost nothing, perfectly: the space between the notes is where the groove lives. It is also a tribute — the title track of the band’s first album after singer Bon Scott’s death — and its refusal to mope is the point. Stadiums on every continent still use it as a walk-on.
9. “Gimme Shelter” — The Rolling Stones (1969, Let It Bleed)
Keith Richards’ trembling, echoing guitar figure sounds like weather approaching — appropriate for a song that opens an album made in a year of assassinations and war. The intro builds dread slowly, voices wordlessly rising in the background, so that when Merry Clayton eventually tears into her verse the storm has a human face. It is the most cinematic opening in the Stones’ catalogue.
10. “Smoke on the Water” — Deep Purple (1972, Machine Head)
Four notes. Ritchie Blackmore’s riff is so elemental that it is famously the first thing countless guitarists ever learn — and, legend has it, banned in some guitar shops for that reason. Its power is its plainness: no decoration, no hurry, the band joining one instrument at a time. If recognisability is the test, almost nobody on this list beats it.
11. “Superstition” — Stevie Wonder (1972, Talking Book)
The drums open alone, dry and funky, and then the clavinet riff lands — one of the grittiest keyboard sounds ever recorded, all bite and syncopation. Jeff Beck, who was present during the sessions, has a well-known claim on the drum pattern’s origin, but the finished intro is pure Wonder: a groove so complete that the song could nearly work as an instrumental. Dancefloors still respond to it in the first bar.
12. “Sweet Home Alabama” — Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974, Second Helping)
Three chords, a rolling guitar figure and a spoken “turn it up” — the most relaxed great intro on this list. It sounds like a band settling into a groove it never wants to leave, and that looseness is its signature: you can identify it from the pick-up notes alone. As Southern rock’s calling card, its first five seconds have become cultural shorthand far beyond the song itself.
13. “Under Pressure” — Queen and David Bowie (1981, Hot Space)
Two piano notes and a bassline of seven immortal notes, devised by bassist John Deacon, with finger clicks keeping time. The intro to “Under Pressure” is so distinct that its later sampling in pop-rap caused a famous dispute — proof of how completely those notes belong to this song. Simple, anxious and humane, it builds an entire emotional world from almost nothing.
14. “Seven Nation Army” — The White Stripes (2003, Elephant)
The newest-feeling riff on this list is not a bass at all: Jack White plays a guitar through an octave pedal, and the resulting seven-note figure became a global stadium chant sung by football crowds who may never have heard the record. That migration — from indie single to terrace anthem to universal sporting shorthand — is the strongest cultural-footprint story of any 21st-century intro.
15. “One” — Metallica (1988, …And Justice for All)
Clean, melancholy arpeggios drift over distant battlefield sounds — then, minutes later, the song erupts into a machine-gun rhythm section that mirrors its story of a wounded soldier. The intro matters because of the contrast it sets up: few metal openings are this quiet, and none pay off this brutally. It taught a generation of metal bands that dynamics beat volume alone.
16. “Lose Yourself” — Eminem (2002, 8 Mile soundtrack)
A lone piano-and-guitar figure, circling and unresolved, like a heartbeat before a race. The intro to “Lose Yourself” does exactly what the lyric describes — palms sweating, clock ticking — and its restraint is what makes the first verse land like a starting pistol. It is the definitive hip-hop example of an intro as pure psychological pressure, and it remains the genre’s most quoted opening.
17. “Crazy Train” — Ozzy Osbourne (1980, Blizzard of Ozz)
Randy Rhoads’ minor-key riff, preceded by Ozzy’s manic “all aboard” laugh, relaunched its singer and quietly rewired metal guitar. The intro is theatrical without wasting a note: the riff’s bouncing rhythm feels like the train it describes, and sports arenas have used its opening bars as a hype cue ever since.
18. “Take On Me” — a-ha (1985, Hunting High and Low)
The synth-pop entry: a bouncing, bright keyboard riff that climbs like a staircase and lands in one of pop’s most famous choruses. The intro to “Take On Me” is engineered joy — instantly dated to the eighties in the best possible way, and as recognisable from two bars of synth as any guitar riff above it. A list of the best intros of all time that is all guitars would be missing how much of pop history was written on keyboards.
Best intros by era: the superlatives
Split the list by decade and a pattern emerges. The 1960s and early 1970s contributed mood and invention — the Beatles’ single-chord detonation, the Stones’ gathering storm, The Who’s synth experiment. The late 1970s and 1980s were the riff’s golden age: AC/DC, Eagles, Ozzy Osbourne and Guns N’ Roses all treated the first five seconds as prime real estate. And from the 1990s onward, the winners are dynamic or rhythmic signatures — Nirvana’s quiet-loud explosion, Eminem’s piano pressure, The White Stripes’ chant. The tools changed; the job — be unmistakable before the vocal — never did.
Our honest superlatives: most recognisable in one second, “Smoke on the Water.” Best bassline intro, “Billie Jean,” with “Under Pressure” a breath behind. Best slow build, “Baba O’Riley.” Best use of a single sound, “A Hard Day’s Night.” And the intro we would defend as the greatest of all time, for cultural impact multiplied by sheer construction, is “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
How to actually hear these intros properly
Here is the SoundMavericks angle, and it matters more for intros than for anything else: openings are where recording detail lives. The pick attack on “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the room around the drums on “Superstition,” the layered woodwind behind the guitar on “Stairway to Heaven,” the sub-bass weight under “Billie Jean” — all of it disappears on a laptop speaker. A good pair of headphones with honest detail retrieval and a real soundstage turns these famous first seconds into something you can take apart.
Two practical upgrades make the biggest difference. First, the headphones themselves: our guide to the best noise cancelling headphones is the right starting point if you mostly listen in noisy places, and the best noise cancelling earbuds if you listen on the move — silence around the music is what lets a quiet intro register. Second, the source: the gap between a compressed stream and a lossless one is most obvious on sparse openings, which is why we compared services in Tidal vs Apple Music and formats in FLAC vs MP3. Queue this list in lossless, in order, once. You will hear at least three of these intros as if for the first time.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most recognizable song intro?
“Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple is arguably the most recognizable song intro note-for-note, because its four-note riff is known even by people who cannot name the band. In terms of overall cultural impact, our number one, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, is the most significant intro of the modern era.
What makes a song intro great?
A great song intro combines an instantly identifiable hook, economy — no wasted notes — and a clear promise of the song’s mood. The best music intros work as a signature: they identify the track within seconds, on any speaker, and often become as famous as the song itself.
What is the best guitar intro of all time?
Our pick is “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses for a melodic guitar intro, and “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple for a riff-based one. “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin wins for fingerpicked acoustic playing. All three appear in the top ten of our ranked list above.
Which song has the best bass intro?
“Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson has the best-known bass-led intro in pop, with “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie close behind. Both prove a great intro does not need a guitar: seven or eight perfectly placed bass notes can identify a song forever.
I am the founder of Sound Mavericks, where I provide the polite truth about audio equipment. I started this site because consumer electronics reviews are often too technical. Instead of using a silent lab, I test headphones, earbuds, and Bluetooth speakers in the real world – like on a noisy subway or in a busy coffee shop.
To stay independent, I buy my own review units (mostly from the United States) rather than accepting free gifts from brands. Once I finish testing a product, I sell it locally to our community. My goal is to help you understand sound quality, active noise cancellation (ANC), and battery life without the marketing hype.
