"The Lightning Strike" is a song by Northern Irish–Scottish alternative rock band Snow Patrol from their fifth album, A Hundred Million Suns (2008).

The song received a mixed reaction when the album was released, and though the band were praised for playing it live, the general feeling was that it wasn't a right choice, with one critic calling it "self-indulgent" but forgivable.

[2] In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, lyricist Gary Lightbody revealed the song was conceived after he was caught in a heavy storm one night in Glasgow: "I was pretty terrified – 150-mile-an-hour winds, trees falling down.

Lightbody commented that "Daybreak" "was really affected by Hansa" and "has that Krautrock hypnotic sway to it, and "Heroes"-type guitars swooning over the top", and it made a fitting end to the album.

[7] In an interview to Glide Magazine, Nathan Connolly spoke of the band's desire to not sound like their earlier work, but still maintain their "melody and honesty".

Furthermore, on 9 March 2013, the band announced on social media websites such as Facebook that they had released the accompanying music video on their YouTube channel.

[12] "One night during an electrical storm last winter in Glasgow we penned these pieces of music whilst constructing the new album A Hundred Million SunsWe decided to connect these three songs together and give them one name.Ladies and gentlemen we give you...The Lightning Strike" "The Lightning Strike" has an elaborate live performance with the band playing the song in the backdrop of a projection screen on which a specially made video is played simultaneously; one such performance at the Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf, Netherlands is available via the band's Vevo YouTube channel.

[13] Finch brought Undabo Studios into the project to "help develop an origami style of modeling and texturing" that appears on the album artwork for A Hundred Million Suns.

The video's theme uses a colorful visual language; the birth and development of a star, a spiralling galaxy, and its millions of pieces, which flow smoothly into each other; the formation of space, birds, animated rockets, satellites, fishes, havens, oceans, boats, cities, landscapes, rainbows, cars, and planets and many other visual impressions.

[15] The full sixteen-minute animated video for "The Lightning Strike" is available via Vimeo and saw its official release as a part of Up to Now (2009), the band's first compilation album.

[17] Rolling Stone was quite positive about the song, saying "the band distinguishes itself from the post-Coldplay pack with a flair for arrangements that almost justifies the grandiosity of 16-minute epics like "The Lightning Strike"".

Reviewer Ross Langager called the song "a 16-minute, three-movement celestial metaphor of operatic grandeur and overwhelming beauty".

He further praised the song, saying: "Linked together by alike synthesizer bedrocks of gradually increasing warmth and brightness, the song-cycle progresses from silver-lined dark clouds to hints of dawn before finally settling on a lovely, sun-drenched morning.

But even when faced by such an inexorable process of hopefulness, Lightbody has to temper the surge of light: "Slowly the day breaks/Apart in our hands"".

He called it ambitious and felt that "its incorporation of minimalist techniques, glockenspiel, brass colouration and shoegazey guitar textures" made the song "lengthy".

He reported that, though the song was a welcome change in the encore, some fans did not appreciate it and headed home: "After all, they'd already heard "Run", and the traffic's awful this time of night".

[25] Journal Live also covered the concert, with Helen Dalby writing that it was "interesting" and "different" for the band to play the song, but she wasn't "entirely sure it quite worked".

[2] James Cabooter of Daily Star, who covered the show at Bloomsbury Theatre wrote that the newer material (including "The Lightning Strike") was deeper and more mature sonically.