The Metallica album Lars Ulrich hoped would piss people off: “It was a challenge”
The life of a Metallica fan has always been a little bit tough to manage.
It should be the easiest thing in the world to see one of the biggest names in metal play METAL music, but there were always bound to be those that were complaining whenever they strayed too far from thrash, whether that was having the gall to release a ballad or sign to a major label and make radio-friendly hard rock. For all the supposed “betrayals” that the band made to their fanbase, Lars Ulrich never apologised for the band taking a risk whenever they could.
From day one, Ulrich was always about trying to evolve in any way, shape or form whenever they band played. As much as their first four albums are masterpieces of thrash metal, not all of them necessarily sound the same, either. MAster of Puppets is as purely concentrated metal as it gets, Kill Em All has the punk edge of them starting to figure out how to make classic tunes, and And Justice For All was the closest they ever came to making something that mildly resembled prog-rock.
But when The Black Album came out, you could practically hear a bunch of purists soiling themselves when ‘Nothing Else Matters’ came on. A lot of Metallica’s ballads had the decency of being heavy in the back half, but this was a tender-hearted tune that was like a grizzly version of a hair metal ballad for some people. That wasn’t what Metallica was about in their eyes, but it was a new decade, and Ulrich felt it was time for another major change when the next album came out.
And as if an album cover that featured blood and semen mixed together wasn’t a dead giveaway, Load was a massive change of pace for the band. No one could have predicted that they would have gone for a much mellower sound so quickly after making their classics, but as far as Ulrich could tell, this was the next step after listening to some of his favourite bands of the time.
They were already pulling from the likes of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath all the way back on their first albums, but the biggest names for Ulrich at the time were people like U2 and Oasis. These were artists that actually had an agenda outside of playing meatheaded riffs, and if their attempt to change with the times ended up upsetting some fans, that was frankly their problem in his eyes.
There was no way that they were going to be pigeonholed, and Ulrich practically welcomed the idea of people being pissed off, saying, “It felt like a big ‘fuck you’. Not to the fans, more to the conservative element that was running through the heavy metal community, the predictability of all of it. It was a challenge to the heavy metal community and I’m proud of that, because once in a while the heavy metal community needs a good fucking kick up its ass.”
To be fair, the metalheads were probably never going to get onboard with tunes like ‘Mama Said’ or ‘Hero of the Day’, but there’s a lot of heavy stuff that people forget about. Since most people would listen to ‘Until it Sleeps’ once and skip the entire record, songs like ‘Bleeding Me’ and ‘The House that Jack Built’ take all of the sounds of the time and turn them into the darkest songs the band have ever made, especially with lyrics about James Hetfield trying to confront his demons.
So if the thought of a Metallica album having a bit more variety made some fans a little bit perturbed, that was simply too damn bad. Ulrich wanted to be in it for the long haul, and while AC/DC were capable of making the same record over again whenever they walked into the studio, it was much better for the thrash legends to carve out their own path one album at a time.
