“The Struggle Within” is track 12 on Metallica’s The Black Album.
It closes the standard 12-track album, following “My Friend of Misery.” The song is a compact, aggressive ending after the record’s best-known sequence of singles and ballads. Its placement gives the original album a forceful final statement rather than ending with one of its slower songs.
The album’s track order is important because the original vinyl edition divided the music across four sides. Tracks 1 through 3 appeared on Side A, tracks 4 through 6 on Side B, tracks 7 through 9 on Side C, and tracks 10 through 12 on Side D.
The song was written by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, with Kirk Hammett and Jason Newsted also receiving composition credits on the album. Because the album has twelve standard tracks, “The Struggle Within” is sometimes described simply as the closing track rather than by its numerical position.