Some riffs ask you to play them. The "Nemesis" riff by Arch Enemy grabs you by the collar, screams "WE WILL LIVE FOREVER" in Angela Gossow's voice, and then dares your right hand to keep up. Spoiler: your right hand is a coward and will need a talking-to.
This little clip is me running that fast, driving shred section from Arch Enemy's "Nemesis" — a melodic death metal riff that hits like a truck and is an absolute blast to play. If you've been hunting for the Arch Enemy "Nemesis" guitar tab and wondering why it sounds meaner than the notes suggest, this is your part.
How the "Nemesis" shred riff actually works
The secret isn't your fretting hand — it's the picking. This part lives at a punishing tempo (the song sits around 195 BPM), and it's built on relentless, even alternate picking with a locked-down palm mute anchoring the low strings. The notes themselves are pure melodic death metal: a minor-key line that leans on the darker colours of the scale to sound urgent and aggressive rather than pretty. It's not sweep picking and it's not tapping — it's raw, controlled picking-hand stamina, which is honestly the least glamorous and most useful thing a metal guitarist can build.
Concrete takeaway: don't chase the recording. Set a metronome to something embarrassingly slow — 90 BPM — and play the riff with a strict down-up-down-up pattern while keeping your palm resting on the bridge for that tight palm mute. Only bump the tempo up 5 BPM once you can play it three times clean. Your picking hand builds speed the same way you build a callus: boringly, and over time. If you want the theory behind why these notes sound so venomous, it's mostly the minor key doing the emotional heavy lifting.
Fair warning: the first day, your forearm will feel like you arm-wrestled Michael Amott and lost. The second day it feels like you lost twice. Then one morning it just clicks and you're the villain of your own practice room. For the full tab, GuitarPro file and my slowed-down breakdown, come hang out on my Patreon.