"Until It Sleeps" is a song by American heavy metal band Metallica from their 1996 album Load. It was the band's first number one song on the US Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, as well as their first and only song as of the release of Death Magnetic to hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, debuting and peaking at number 10.

The song was performed with orchestral accompaniment on the album S&M.

An early demo version of this song was entitled "F.O.B.D" (recorded on December 8, 1995), because it reminded the band members of the Soundgarden song "Fell on Black Days," in that the "It grips you...It stains you..." refrain is in the same 6/4 time signature that "Fell on Black Days" is in. The band can be heard saying "Fell on Black Days" on the fanclub-only Fancan 1 CD just prior to jamming on a portion of "Until It Sleeps." The 10" vinyl version of the single is red in color.

Moby, credited as "Herman Melville", did an industrial-sounding remix used as a B-side.

"Until It Sleeps" became the first "officially" pirated MP3 when it was released by Compress ’Da Audio (a piracy group and spinoff of the Warez scene) via a Internet Relay Chat network on August 10, 1996.

The song also has a music video directed by Samuel Bayer (Nirvana, Green Day, The Smashing Pumpkins). It was shot in various locations around Los Angeles on May 6 and 7 in 1996. It was premiered by MTV on May 21. The video depicts surreal concepts dealing with fall of a human, taken from various paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Apart from the general forms inspired from Bosch's paintings, the prominent figures in the video are the human-eating monster from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the fall of Adam and Eve from Haywain and Christ in the Crucifige Eum (Crucify Him) scene of Ecce Homo.

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