"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is a song by American thrash metal band Metallica.

In March 2023, Rolling Stone magazine ranked "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at number 39 on their "100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time" list.

[3] The song was inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about the process of death in modern warfare and the bloody Spanish Civil War.

Specific allusions are made to the scene described in Chapter 27 of the book, in which five soldiers are obliterated during an airstrike after taking a defensive position on a hill.

Cliff Burton plays the bass guitar introduction with heavy distortion and a wah pedal.