The Christmas season has officially started! There's finally a mash-up of Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You."

You can listen to the new mash-up below.

The song features James Hetfield's vocals on top of Carey's famous instrumental track. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was found on Metallica's second album, 1984's Ride the Lightning, and it's long been a live staple. According to Setlist, it's tied with "One" as the fourth most-performed Metallica song, having been played 1,528 times.

Carey released the Phil Spector-inspired "All I Want for Christmas Is You" on her 1994 album, Merry Christmas. At the time, the song didn't chart on the Billboard Hot 100 due to it being commercially unavailable as a single, but it has continued to grow in stature ever since.

Over the years, Billboard has changed the way it calculates its charts to include streaming platforms and other metrics, and that paid off for Carey in a major way. Shortly before Christmas 2019, 25 years after its release, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" topped the Hot 100, making it the first holiday song to hit No. 1 since David Seville and the Chipmunks' "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" performed the feat in 1958. Its rise to the top, and the history of Christmas songs on the pop charts, was chronicled in a December 2019 episode of Slate's Hit Parade podcast.

Carey acknowledged the song's status as a seasonal staple on Twitter yesterday, uploading a video of a masked man opening a door, only to find the singer, clad in holiday pajamas, sitting under a Christmas tree. "It's time," she says, before letting out a scream as the song begins.

 

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