The Metallica album James Hetfield called their peak: “Created this electricity”
Going through the entire discography of Metallica may be one of the strangest rides in metal history. There might be great stuff to be found on every record, but the idea of going from the most sonically rich albums ever made to something like St Anger or Lulu is enough to have people questioning their sanity halfway through the experience. Although James Hetfield is one of the few who could claim to have seen it all throughout every part of the band, he still thought nothing came close to The Black Album.
At the same time, there’s still a good contingency of metal fans who hate the group’s mainstream breakthrough with all their hearts. These were the guys from the underground who were meant to play stadiums for the rest of their lives without any major hit on the radio. If they had kept doing that, though, wouldn’t everything have gotten stale?
For those naysayers who cuddle up to their copies of Master of Puppets and don’t speak the name ‘Enter Sandman’, there isn’t much that could be improved about The Black Album. It did have a more commercial sheen, but since And Justice For All saw them shooting themselves in the foot from a production standpoint, why would we all be arguing about the album actually sounding good?
I’ll admit that songs like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ took a bit of getting used to, but the fact that this record exposed millions of people to metal music who would have never thought twice about it is far from a bad thing. It didn’t come without some hardship, either, as Hetfield blew his voice out halfway through the album and had to work everything back into shape.
There was also tension between Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, but it was all done in service to the album, with Hetfield telling VH1, “It was a constant battle between Lars and I. We would be arguing about ridiculous things that didn’t matter, and we would argue for hours over it. But the tension and the static created this electricity where we were hitting a new peak in everything.”
Outside of getting their first major hits on the radio, the album has remained one of the best-selling metal releases of all time, usually being every aspiring fan’s gateway into Metallica when hearing tracks like ‘Sad But True’ and ‘The Unforgiven’. They watered their sound down a little bit, but that was far from a bad thing.
Even though the tracks were a little less heavy, every song on the album corresponds to a piece of their old sound that someone could dig into. If you liked ‘Holier Than Thou’, you can check out their heavier material like ‘Master of Puppets’, or if you just wanted to stick with the ballads like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, you could go back and check out songs like ‘Fade to Black’ or ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’.
Granted, the band did end up going a little too far the other way when working on Load and ReLoad, but The Black Album marks the perfect balance between their aggressive and softer side. It might be the metal equivalent of Dark Side of the Moon at this point, but sometimes those kinds of banner numbers exist for a damn good reason.
