Metallica
Metallica is a musician.
Five years separate Kill ’Em All from Master of Puppets, and almost everything that matters about Metallica happens inside them. The band formed in Los Angeles in 1981 around vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, moved to San Francisco, and turned speed into structure. Kill ’Em All (1983) is fast and thin. Ride the Lightning (1984) adds arrangement. Master of Puppets (1986) is where it arrives: long, orchestrated, still savage, and the record most people mean when they say thrash metal.
What Hetfield and Ulrich understood before their peers is that heaviness is a matter of arrangement, not tempo. A Metallica song usually has three or four distinct sections, a clean-toned opening that lulls you, and the best riff held back until well past the halfway mark. That is closer to how a composer thinks about a theme than to how a punk band thinks about a chorus, and it is why the songs survive being played by an orchestra and by a fourteen-year-old in a bedroom.
They were one of the founding big four of thrash alongside Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer, and then they left the category. …And Justice for All (1988) is the most complicated and the worst sounding record they ever made. Metallica (1991), the black album, cut the songs in half and sold to everybody. Load and Reload traded one audience for a larger one and are still argued about. St. Anger (2003) is the low point by broad consensus, Death Magnetic (2008) the correction, and Hardwired… to Self‐Destruct and 72 Seasons are a late-career band doing their own material well.
The current line-up is Hetfield, Ulrich, Kirk Hammett on lead guitar and Robert Trujillo on bass; former members include the bassists Ron McGovney, Cliff Burton and Jason Newsted. They hold a Grammy for best metal performance, and Lulu, the collaboration record, exists as proof that they were never as calculating as their critics claimed.
Music (17)
- Master of Puppets (1986)
- Metallica (1991)
- …And Justice for All (1988)
- Ride the Lightning (1984)
- Kill ’Em All (1983)
- Death Magnetic (2008)
- St. Anger (2003)
- Load (1996)
- Reload (1997)
- Hardwired… to Self‐Destruct (2016)
- Lulu (2011)
- Garage Inc. (1998)
- 72 Seasons (2023)
- S&M (1999)
- Live Shit: Binge & Purge (1993)
- Through the Never (Music From the Motion Picture) (2013)
- Orgullo, pasión, y gloria: Tres noches en La Ciudad de México (2009)
Where to start with Metallica
Master of Puppets is where to begin and everything else is measured against it. Ambition and aggression are in exact balance on that record, and if it does nothing for you, the rest of the catalogue will not either.
Then go backwards to Ride the Lightning, nearly as good and rawer, before Kill ’Em All, which is mainly of historical interest now. Forwards, Metallica is the one your non-metal friends already own and it earns those sales. Save …And Justice for All for later, because the production is a genuine obstacle before you love the band.
S&M is the best live document here and the clearest proof of the arrangement argument. Garage Inc. is the covers record and the most purely enjoyable thing they have. 72 Seasons is a good late album nobody needs before the first five. St. Anger is a curiosity and Lulu is a dare.
The four thrash albums the argument is really about
Kill 'Em All is the young band at full speed, Ride the Lightning is where the ambition arrives, Master of Puppets is about as good as the form gets, and And Justice for All is the most technical and worst-mixed record they ever released. Four albums in five years.
The Metallica records that split the fanbase
The black album sold thirty million copies by slowing everything down, and the two Load records went further into blues and hair. Purists have never forgiven any of it. Heard now, without the nineties argument attached, they are better than their reputation and genuinely different from the thrash.