Songfacts®:

• The longest song off Metallica's album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct "Halo On Fire" runs for 8:15, including a two-minute breakdown section at the end.
• Vocalist and lyricist James Hetfield told the band's fan-club magazine So What! about the track:
  
  "'Halo On Fire', there's a juxtaposition in all of us, good, evil, and when does that come out, when does it show itself? Some people portray themselves as real saints, [and] the more their darkness is, the more they have to portray themselves as saints. So you're basically getting away from the real 'you,' like you're making up for all of this [stuff] that you think is really bad.
  
  I think also… what was that one show? Fifty Shades Of Grey? I never saw it, but I saw some highlights of it where it was like, 'Oh, this guy is well accomplished and look at this guy.' And then he's got this basement of torture and horror all for his pleasure, and people [were] falling for it and wanting it. And then at the end of the day, they both bleed. It's not good for anybody."
• The song's music video stars a young woman who is cheered on by fans at an underground fight club. "We practiced many times, but it was different at different stages of our practice," one of the women fighters said in a behind the scenes video. "At first, we would just do it in the RV and then here without any people and then with the people it was just a totally different level. It was so fun."
  
  The visual was directed by the Brooklyn-based album package photography duo Herring and Herring. They also filmed the clips for "Am I Savage?" and "Now That We're Dead."
• This was the sixth Hardwired track to chart on Mainstream Rock Songs. The previous album that yielded six entries on the Mainstream Rock Songs tally was Nickelback's 2005' LP All the Right Reasons.
• This is one of lead guitarist Kirk Hammett's favorite Metallica songs. He told Uncut magazine: "I loved 'Halo On Fire' because to me it's along the lines of hard rock in the 1970s. A lot of the best music for me came out of that period so if we create something like that, then I'm going to really appreciate it."