Shoot to Thrill

The first time I heard the riff from Shoot to Thrill, I knew it wasn’t just any song. Not because of its energy —which is pure—, but because of how that bass and guitar intertwine in a game of tensions that seems straight out of a Western movie. Angus Young made it clear: the part that comes after the main solo isn’t just a simple bridge, but a deliberate homage to the final scene of Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. The initial silence, that crescendo tightening like a spring, and then the explosion with the chords of A, G, and D in sequence, is like watching Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach facing off in an empty cemetery. Even the sound of the guitar in that section feels like a shot that never comes, but is already there, in your head, before it explodes.

The lyrics, on the other hand, don’t talk about cowboys or duels, but something more everyday and dark: a drug dealer distributing pills across London’s neighborhoods like the milkman on the corner. Brian Johnson put it bluntly: bored, lonely housewives consuming something that led them to seek thrills in other arms. The title, Shoot to Thrill, could be a nod to those injectable substances promising quick relief, but also to the adrenaline of living on the edge. Recorded between April and May 1980 at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, with Mutt Lange at the helm, the song ended up as the second track on Back in Black, the album released on July 25 of that same year —and, unwittingly, the mirror in which the world saw AC/DC reborn after Bon Scott’s death. It wasn’t released as a single, but on classic rock radio it slipped in as an instant classic, and years later, in 2010, they even gave it a new video with footage from Iron Man 2 filmed at the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires during a December 2009 concert. The same city where, in 2011, they released a 7-inch vinyl version for Record Store Day, with a live version of War Machine on the B-side.