"Achilles Last Stand" is a song by the English rock group Led Zeppelin, featured as the opening track on their 1976 album Presence. It was written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at Page's house in Malibu, California, where they stayed for a month while Plant was recovering from injuries he sustained in a car accident in Greece in 1975. The song was then recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany. It is often seen as a precursor to the new wave of British heavy metal sound that would expand soon after.

"Achilles Last Stand", at 10 minutes and 26 seconds, is the third longest studio recording released by Led Zeppelin (after "In My Time of Dying" at 11:06 and "Carouselambra" at 10:34). It features John Bonham's drumming, John Paul Jones' bass line (played on a custom-built Alembic eight string bass) and Jimmy Page's overdubbed orchestral guitar arrangement (the dozen or so guitar tracks having been recorded in Munich in a single session). Page applied vari-speed during production of this song to speed up some of the guitar overdubs, one of the few times he employed that device in the studio for Led Zeppelin songs. In 1977, he explained:

I'll tell you about doing all the guitar overdubs to "Achilles Last Stand." There were basically two sections to the song when we rehearsed it. I know John Paul Jones didn't think I could succeed in what I was attempting to do. He said I couldn't do a scale over a certain section, that it just wouldn't work. But it did. What I planned to try and get that epic quality into it so it wouldn't just sound like two sections repeated, was to give the piece a totally new identity by orchestrating the guitars, which is something I've been into for quite some time. I knew it had to be jolly good, because the number was so long it just couldn't afford to be half-baked. It was all down to me how to do this. I had a lot of it mapped out in my mind, anyway, but to make a long story short, I did all the overdubs in one night ... I thought as far as I can value tying up that kind of emotion as a package and trying to convey it through two speakers, it was fairly successful.

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