Songfacts®:

• The song is about The Painkiller, a personage created by Judas Priest. He is sent to the world to destroy evil and rescue mankind.
• This is the title track to the last Judas Priest album before lead singer Rob Halford left the band to pursue a solo career. It also marks the debut of their new drummer, Scott Travis, the first American admitted into the band.
  
  The album was finished in the spring of 1990 but its release was delayed because the band had to stand trial, accused of inserting subliminal messages into their album Stained Class that caused two troubled teens to shoot themselves. They were exonerated, but before an arduous trial where they had to convince a judge they were not evildoers out to subvert the youth.
  
  The album was well received and the subsequent tour was a winner, but Rob Halford found he couldn't make music outside the band without quitting Judas Priest. He was replaced in 1996 by a fan who sang in a cover band - Tim "Ripper" Owens - and returned in 2003.
• Frontman Rob Halford told Kerrang! magazine May 25, 2013 that this is the song he's most proud to have written. He explained: "I think it's a wonderful statement. It embodies what metal is - it's everything a full-on screamy metal track should have. Everybody is going a million miles an hour on it, and yet the melody still comes across. That statement that 'He is the Painkiller' - you get 30,000 metalheads chanting it at a festival and it's a great feeling. It's become a very important song for Priest, and for metal too, I think."
• This is the final song on Rock Band 2. It is Level 7 difficulty on all five parts. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Aaron - Seattle, WA
• Keyboardist Don Airey played bass on Painkiller because Judas Priest bassist Ian Hill was unable to take part in recording sessions due to illness. Airey, who had worked with both Ozzy Osbourne and Rainbow before becoming Deep Purple's keyboardist in 2002, played most of the album's bass parts on a Minimoog. Speaking with AntiHero magazine in 2020, he recalled:
  
  "All the bass parts are me playing on the mini. It's Moog bass on the whole album, that was Ian Hill's bass mixed in as well on parts. But at the time Ian wasn't very well. So, he wasn't at the sessions. So, I got made to do all the bass and they kept it."
• Judas Priest originally booked Airey to play keyboards, but because the rockers wanted the album to have a heavier sound than their previous work, he only played keys on "A Touch of Evil."
  
  "[Judas Priest] were so worried about it they didn't even give me a credit, I don't think, on the album," he recalled. "They paid me, which is always the point."
• The song was covered by death metal band Death in 1998. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Pufan Alexandru
• Drummer Scott Travis' intro is recognized as one of the most iconic drum intros of all time. Travis wrote the "Painkiller" intro at Miraval Studios in Nice, France in early 1990. As producer Chris Tsangarides and engineer Patrice Roullion tinkered with mic setups, Travis found himself in a rock 'n' roll playground.
  
  Picture this: a massive room, drums all set up, and the control room way on the other side of the studio. Travis, fueled by the early morning energy, would grab his trusty headphones and dive into a jamming frenzy. It was a spot where he could let loose, working on the next song in the pipeline.
  
  "It was just a cool place - very comfortable to just go and play whatever you wanted. I knew we were gonna be working on the 'Painkiller' song and it was meant to be a fast-paced upbeat song," he recalled to Invisible Oranges.
  
  "[I was] just out there messing around, doing a flurry of things like that, exercises and whatnot," Travis continued. "I had the 'Painkiller' idea in my head and they really liked what I was doing and they said, 'Hey, just do some more of that, some stuff like that.' And I just kind of whipped it up."