C# minor · Camelot 12A · 103 BPM
Painkiller
by Judas Priest
- 103
- BPM
- C# minor
- Key
- 12A
- Camelot
- 44
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
Scott Travis composed the drum introduction that opens "Painkiller" in the studio, playing it at first as nothing more than a warm-up routine while the engineers tested the drum microphones. The English heavy metal band Judas Priest kept the part, and it became the signature opening of the song, released in 1990 on Columbia Records as a single from the band's twelfth album, also called Painkiller.
The track opens that album, and its lyrics describe the cyborg superhero who appears on the cover, a character who saves mankind from destruction. Travis was new to the band at the time, having replaced drummer Dave Holland.
Guitarist Glenn Tipton later named the solo on "Painkiller" as one of his favorites to perform, alongside the solo on "Beyond the Realms of Death". The song grew into one of Judas Priest's most popular, and it ranked highly in retrospective lists decades on: Loudwire placed it second among the band's ten greatest songs in 2012, and Louder Sound put it first on a 2019 list of their fifty best.
Painkiller runs at 103 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.33 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 583 ms. It is in C# minor, Camelot 12A, which shares its notes with E major and mixes cleanly with F# minor and Ab minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.