"Empire of the Clouds" is a song by the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden from their sixteenth studio album, The Book of Souls. The song was issued as a single on 16 April 2016, tying in with Record Store Day. It is the band's first single since 1996's "Virus" that hasn't been performed live.

"Empire of the Clouds", at 18 minutes in length, is Iron Maiden's longest song to date, overtaking "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from their 1984 album, Powerslave. The track tells the story of the R101 airship, which crashed on its maiden voyage in northern France on 5 October 1930. The song was written entirely by the band's lead vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, who initially intended it to be about "World War I fighter airplanes;" Dickinson abandoned the idea after using the same theme for the song "Death or Glory," also from The Book of Souls. At the time of recording, Dickinson was reading "a big, sort of encyclopedic crash report" of the R101, entitled To Ride the Storm, which gave him the idea for the song's eventual subject. Dickinson describes it as "A very poignant story, a very human story, a story of ambition and dreams."

Dickinson largely composed "Empire of the Clouds" during The Book of Souls' recording sessions at Guillaume Tell Studios, Paris. According to one of the group's guitarists, Adrian Smith, Dickinson "was working on it for about a month on his own" in a sound-proof booth. The track features Dickinson's debut on piano, as he used the studio's Steinway grand piano to write the song, although he used a keyboard on the actual recording, thereby making it easier to edit out his mistakes.

According to Smith, the song was a challenge for the rest of the band as they had to play along to Dickinson's piano track while following his and producer Kevin Shirley's instructions. In addition to the band's parts, additional orchestration was added to the song afterwards, while Nicko McBrain experimented with a variety of percussive instruments, including a bowed gong, to recreate the airship's crash.

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