Hockey

Artistry on ice or the UFC on skates — no matter how you slice it, hockey demands a soundtrack as hard-hitting, as hypersonic as the game itself. We’ll drop the puck in our first period of play with Warren Zevon, who teams up with sportswriter Mitch Albom and David Letterman for the story of a goon’s greatest glory in “Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song),” soon to be made into a Kevin Smith film. Right after “He shoots, he scores,” we’ll slide into the all-time go-to track for celebration and jubilation, Gary Glitter’s aaaaye-inspiring crowd-rouser, “Rock and Roll (Part 2).” And who hasn’t wanted to be the between-period Regent of the Rink, jauntily squired around — and around and around — to the strains of Martin Zellar’s “I Wanna Drive the Zamboni.”

In Next Steps, we’ll go to a fight, and a hockey game breaks out . . . or is it the other way around?

Hockey’s as much a game of fury and fists as it is skating and scoring, and in our Next Steps, we’ve got just the playlist for a superlative slugfest. If one sound can fire up the crowd more than the thud of a player getting slammed into the boards, it’s the boom-boom-clap! Boom-boom-clap! of Queen’s anthem “We Will Rock You.” When all that pent-up adrenaline calls for dropping the gloves and serving up a knuckle sandwich, you can bet the PA announcer cues up Chumbawamba’s bloody-but-unbowed rocker “Tubthumping” way before the ref breaks up the brawl. And as the villain — or hero — skates off to the penalty box for a couple of minutes to contemplate his sins, he’ll likely get a taunting earful of Ray Anthony & His Orchestra’s doom-laden theme to “Dragnet.”

In Deep Cuts, we’ll take you from the pregame to the post-period pause with punk, pop, and more.

Maybe not every moment in a hockey game gets greeted with cheers, but pretty much every aspect is signaled by song. When Boston’s Fenway Park hosted the 2010 Winter Classic, the Dropkick Murphys cranked out a punk pregame pump-up, and in “Time to Go,” they not only give a literalshout-out to the black-and-gold-clad local heroes, but to old-time hockey as well. Seems like a million face-offs per season are accompanied by the synth sting of Van Halen’s “Jump”; fact is, lots of younger hockey fans probably don’t even know the song has lyrics. And between periods, when the Kiss-Cam works its occasionally horrifying magic on the crowd, you can bet it’s going to be some version of the “Chicken Dance” that’s egging on the chickens in the stands to a video-scoreboard smooch.

They call it the coolest game on ice, so it makes perfect sense that the hottest songs in the pop world get played in its rinks and arenas across two countries. Whether you’re rooting for your local NHL, AHL, college, junior, or pee-wee team, these are the tracks that amp up both players and fans to playoff pitch. From the celebration of “putting the biscuit in the basket,” to the ominous tolling for some troublemaker being sent off for two minutes to the “sin bin,” to the sheer joy of riding around on the Zamboni between periods, we’ve assembled the perfect playlist for 60 solid minutes of rock ’em, sock ’em hockey . . . and we even have enough to keep you pumped through overtime.