Metallica

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Metallica (Remastered)
    Metallica (Remastered)
    Metallica (Remastered)

    The first people Metallica thanked when they won a Grammy Award in 1991, for what became known as The Black Album, were the progressive rock band Jethro Tull. Not because of their inordinate influence on Metallica, or even because Metallica felt a kinship with them—but because Jethro Tull hadn’t put out their own album that year to stand as competition. Tull had infamously won the award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 1989—a reflection of both the Academy’s disconnect with metal culture and how uneasily it sat in the mainstream. And while The Black Album’s win didn’t constitute acceptance, per se, it acknowledged what fans of the band had understood for going on 10 years: Metal was the vanguard of hard rock, and Metallica was the vanguard of metal. Drummer and cowriter Lars Ulrich says they used to labor for hours over the perfect take, Frankenstein-ing together fragments of drum parts, punching in riffs, blending and overdubbing until every wrinkle was ironed flat. They wanted precision, and by precision they meant technical mastery—a superlative in a world where the goal is to play as hard, fast, and complicatedly as possible without slipping. And it isn’t that The Black Album isn’t complex. But whereas tracks like “One,” “Master of Puppets,” and “Seek & Destroy”—songs that not only defined Metallica’s sound, but the sound of ’80s metal in general—foregrounded complexity as proof of the band’s stamina and ambition, the music here is streamlined and the performances natural. Ulrich says producer Bob Rock helped them understand their recordings not just as seamless stacks of riffs, but as shapes with ebb and flow, rise and fall. In the songs’ simplicity is a clear confidence: “Enter Sandman” and “Sad but True” are two of the heaviest tracks the band recorded, but also two of the most straightforward. “The Unforgiven” evokes Celtic folk and the majestic spaghetti Western soundtracks of Ennio Morricone (whose “The Ecstasy of Gold” long served as their walk-on music), but it works just as well around the campfire. James Hetfield wasn’t sure whether “Nothing Else Matters” even belonged on a Metallica album—it was so personal, so disclosing. But they’d always trusted their gut, and in doing so helped revise Led Zeppelin ballads for the post-punk era: They thrash, but they do it with tenderness. 

  • ...And Justice for All (Remastered)
    ...And Justice for All (Remastered)
    ...And Justice for All (Remastered)

    1988

  • Master of Puppets (Remastered)
    Master of Puppets (Remastered)
    Master of Puppets (Remastered)

    100 Best Albums During a 1986 tour stop in Houston, Metallica visited a local record store to promote Master of Puppets. There were two ways of getting to the store from the hotel: a van and a limousine. Riding in the limo would’ve been an affront to the band’s ethic. But riding in the van—without air conditioning, at the height of the Houston summer—would’ve been an exercise in pride. With Ride the Lightning, the band found themselves caught between the worlds of underground purity and mainstream recognition. Master of Puppets was even more popular, and the music even more intense: in speed, in aggression, in its suspicion and hostility toward forces of control. It’s an old question in rock music: How can you scream along to songs about the perils of conformity without becoming a product of it? The band took the limo, but they blasted the Misfits on the way, as though to keep at bay what everyone already knew: Their days in vans were numbered. In MTV footage from around the album’s release, Lars Ulrich tells an interviewer that Metallica is still four idiots trying to stay in tune and on time. The modesty isn’t entirely false: For all its precision, Master of Puppets still feels like the product of the basement or garage. And where the boys’ nights out of Van Halen and Mötley Crüe promise relief (through girls, through drugs, through sheer lack of inhibition), Metallica plays with the restless intensity of someone who can’t catch a break from their spiral of negative thoughts, whether about war (“Disposable Heroes”), addiction (“Master of Puppets”), religious evangelism (”Leper Messiah”), or the failure of mental healthcare to treat those who need it most (“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”). They may sound epic, but their concerns are almost violently earthly. That the album’s sole moment of reflection is named after a constellation makes sense (“Orion”): On Master of Puppets, hell is here and relief is a long way off.

  • Ride the Lightning (Remastered) [2016 Remastered Version]
    Ride the Lightning (Remastered) [2016 Remastered Version]
    Ride the Lightning (Remastered) [2016 Remastered Version]

    Containing all of the thrashing speed and rage of Metallica’s debut, Ride the Lightning pours these traits into intricately structured epics grounded in sociopolitical commentary. It opens with the classic melody of “Fight Fire With Fire,” a terrifying look at nuclear armageddon, while “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a fiercely chugging examination of war with ominous harmonics. But the album’s boldest moment is “Fade to Black,” a bleak ballad from the perspective of a young man contemplating suicide.

  • Kill 'Em All (Remastered)
    Kill 'Em All (Remastered)
    Kill 'Em All (Remastered)

    Metallica’s 1983 debut changed everything. Giving a stiff middle finger to LA’s spandex ’n’ hairspray flash-metal scene, guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich took their love of Motörhead, Judas Priest, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and turned the aggression up to 11. After poaching Exodus guitarist Kirk Hammett and Trauma bassist Cliff Burton from their respective bands, Metallica had the prime-time personnel to carve off thrash metal’s first—and most ferocious—album. Hetfield kicks off opener “Hit the Lights” with a throat-scraping shriek before delivering a howling tribute to heavy metal itself. Based on an unfinished song from his previous band, Leather Charm, the track threatens to careen off the rails at any moment—much like most of the album. Next up, “The Four Horsemen” is perhaps the most famous A/B comparison case in heavy metal history. Originally written by former Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine—who went on to form Megadeth—Metallica’s version features Hetfield’s lyrics about the mythical horsemen of the apocalypse. Mustaine’s version, “Mechanix,” lyrics bulging with sexual innuendo, appears on Megadeth’s 1985 debut, Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! Forty years on, the song remains a source of much debate. Meanwhile, high-velocity singles “Whiplash” and “Jump in the Fire” deal with heavy metal casualties and eternal damnation, respectively. Nesting between them like a coiled serpent, Burton’s indelible one-take bass solo, “(Anesthesia)—Pulling Teeth,” remains a marvel of the form. “Seek & Destroy,” the first song Metallica ever wrote, was inspired by Diamond Head’s “Dead Reckoning.” (Metallica covered several Diamond Head songs, including “Am I Evil?”, which appears as a bonus track on later versions of Kill ’Em All.) Introduced by Ulrich’s unforgettable drum salvo, “Motorbreath” distills touring life into a three-minute blitzkrieg of gas-huffing intensity. It’s easily one of the band’s most effective and underappreciated songs. “Phantom Lord” starts with an ominous, Carpenter-esque synth drone before kicking into an amped-up NWOBHM riff and a clean-guitar bridge that foreshadows compositions on the next two Metallica albums, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. All told, Kill ’Em All is the record that launched a thousand thrash bands while setting Metallica on their inexorable path toward superstardom. While it might have little in common with the radio-ruling songs of the Black Album—or anything they’ve released in the last 30 years—Kill ’Em All is Metallica in their purest form: savage and stripped down, angry and awe-inspiring.

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About Metallica

The members of Metallica didn’t just help invent heavy metal; they evolved with it. Formed in 1981 when a “dorky, disenfranchised” teenager in Southern California—Lars Ulrich, in his own words—placed a classified ad name-checking Iron Maiden and Diamond Head, the band debuted in 1983 with Kill ’Em All and pioneered the blinding synthesis of punk and New Wave of British Heavy Metal we now call thrash. Having moved to the Bay Area in the early ’80s to court bassist Cliff Burton, the group—Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett, guitarist-vocalist James Hetfield, and Burton—went on to fashion metal into a kind of art form, eschewing the glammy appeal of hair metal for ultra-serious, progressively complex song-suites that explored subjects like suicide, political corruption, and the psychological horror of war. Burton was killed in a bus accident in late 1986 and replaced by Jason Newsted for 1988’s epochal … And Justice for All. Even as the band became a global phenomenon in the wake of its 1991 self-titled album, Metallica remained defiantly on its own path, dabbling in Southern rock (1996’s Load), high-concept dirges (2011’s divisive Lou Reed collaboration, Lulu), stripped-down hardcore (2003’s St. Anger), and orchestral live albums (1999’s S&M). This path also circles back to the roots. After 2008’s Death Magnetic updated early Metallica angst for the thrash revival of the 2000s, the Duffer Brothers’ use of “Master of Puppets” in Season 4 of Stranger Things made the ’80s anthem go viral in 2022. This set the stage for the following year’s 72 Seasons, an epic song cycle about youth that reinvents the rawness of the NWOBHM that had initially inspired Metallica. Thus, its story is, in essence, the story of metal itself: a push-pull of simplicity and complexity that continually challenges our understanding of fast and loud.

ORIGIN
Los Angeles, CA, United States
FORMED
October 28, 1981
GENRE
Metal

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