James Hetfield on the album that shows Metallica at their best: “We got to be a part of it”
For most artists, picking a favourite album is like picking a favourite child. Even if there is one that shines far above any of the rest, it’s typically not the best PR move to say that there’s only one project where everything came together. While Metallica could claim to have a few different albums rank among their all-time best, James Hetfield thought that Ride the Lightning stood out above every single album that came afterwards.
But, like any conversation about Metallica, it tends to feel like talking about two completely different bands at times. While they were thrash metal icons that everyone knew and loved from their early days, just as many people got roped into their music through their turn as radio-rock superstars in the 1990s.
If anything, the two records that come up the most often as being Metallica’s best are usually Master of Puppets or The Black Album. The former was the record that put them on the map as the finest metal band in existence in the 1980s, and while the latter does have its fair share of haters for turning the group into a gimmick-driven act, they still had major hits like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ come out of the deal.
When talking about Ride the Lightning, though, Hetfield believed their sophomore record really had everything, telling Newsweek, “I like Ride the Lightning a lot because I think that was the first time we got to be a part of it. With Ride the Lightning, there was no manager telling us, ‘Stay away from this studio’ [laughs]. We were really integrated into it, and we were able to help with the sounds, help with the ideas and all that stuff.”
Whereas most groups have to deal with the lingering feeling of the sophomore slump, Metallica blew all conceptions of their sound out of the water. Their debut, Kill Em All, still held up as a fairly decent metal release, but this was the sound of them taking everything to the next level, whether that was the raw fury of ‘Fight Fire With Fire’, playing their first major ballad on ‘Fade to Black’, or even managing to slip in a nine-minute instrumental in the back half on ‘The Call of Ktulu’.
But just because Hetfield loves the record doesn’t necessarily mean that he likes every song that was recorded for it. Outside of the great tracks across the record, it seems like Hetfield and every other Metallica fan likes to pretend that ‘Escape’ doesn’t exist, usually only reserving it for occasions when listening to the album in full.
Nothing can match what they made on Master of Puppets, but it’s hard to argue that their first masterpiece couldn’t have been made without Ride the Lightning coming first. If anything, this is also a great showcase for bassist Cliff Burton’s talents, penning multiple songs on the record, including the incredible bassline for ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.
Kill Em All was a good proof of concept for what Metallica could do without any major production jobs, but once fans heard what they sounded like with a few pieces of their sound cleaned up, they knew that they were looking at something different. Now, the snot-nosed were about to become one of the greatest metal bands to ever walk the Earth.
