Balls to the Wall

This thundering anthem from the German metal band Accept is the title track to their fifth album. Like the Scorpions did with "Rock You Like A Hurricane," they took an American phrase and put their own spin on it, creating a song to throw your fist in the air. Accept filled the lyric with very aggressive phrases: "balls to the wall" means full throttle and is a great way to rally the base. It gets a little gnarly in some parts: One day the tortured stand up And revolt against evil They make you drink your blood And tear yourself to pieces

In an interview with Metaleater magazine, Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffmann talked about the meaning behind this song. "We've always been interested in politics and in human rights and things like that, so a lot of the lyrics that we had in those days, and to the end actually, were dealing with human rights, for instance, and that's really what 'Balls To The Wall' means: One day the tortured will stand up and kick some butt."

This song might deal with some heavy topics, but it originated from a night of drinking. Udo Dirkschneider was the group's lead singer at the time, and Stefan Kaufmann was their drummer. When Songfacts spoke with Dirkschneider in 2013, he said: "That was just a riff in the beginning. The hook line 'balls to the wall,' the melody 'balls to the wall,' that was it. And nobody has a clue about the verse, how we sing the verse. One night I was sitting there with Stefan Kauffman at his studio, and we said, 'Okay, what can we do?' We had a lot of drinks, and I was in a way really drunk, and then I start singing the verse in some way, and here we go. Then the words came out: 'Balls to the Wall.' Sometimes things happen."