What is the best-selling metal album of all time?
For years, metal music has always seemed to be on the fringes of normal society. Even though Black Sabbath and Judas Priest may have built up legions of fans with their odes to doom and bludgeoning riffs, it’s never going to be easy to crossover to pop radio with that kind of style. Then again, when a band gets the perfect balance of hooks and darkness, they can make chart history.
While metal had been around for a few years in the 1980s, Metallica came storming onto the metal scene like seasoned veterans, crafting songs of pure rock ‘n’ roll rebellion with the speed and intensity of punk music. As much as Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets sold through word of mouth, it didn’t translate to the sales glam rock had around the same time.
Thanks to the arrival of MTV, bands like Poison and Bon Jovi were lighting up the charts, making the same cookie-cutter brand of pop music with a hard rock tinge to make it accessible to metalheads. Though Metallica eventually relented by making a video for their single ‘One’, it would take a while before they found the right formula that worked.
After coming off their album And Justice For All, the band thought the time was right to simplify their sound. Having already made complex nine-minute songs that dragged on forever, Metallica’s choice to hook up with producer Bob Rock was the perfect combination. After manning the boards for acts like Aerosmith and Bon Jovi, Rock knew how to create the kind of records that radio loved to hear.
That’s not to say that the simple stuff would be easy. Throughout the making of The Black Album, Metallica struggled to get on the same page often, including one episode where Kirk Hammett had to be worked up to create the final guitar solo on ‘The Unforgiven’.
When the band finally unveiled their new vision, some thrash fans felt betrayed, thinking that their favourite heavy metal band had sold out and made one of the biggest missteps in their career. For the rest of the world, Metallica crafted one of the sturdiest heavy metal albums of all time.
Off the strength of singles like ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Sad But True’, the band crossed over to the hard rock audience with riffs that were easy to chant along with in stadiums. The public was also ready for James Hetfield to tap into his vulnerable side, relating to the lonely feelings in the middle of ‘Nothing Else Matters’.
Capping the record off with a huge tour that ran for three years, Metallica’s Black Album became one of the most successful metal albums ever, selling over 22 million copies worldwide. Despite the pushback from some of the hardened metalheads, this was the beginning of the world’s acceptance of something heavier on the charts.
While acts like Black Sabbath may have had some time on the album charts now and again, Metallica was the first band to prove that a metal band could become a household name. Though they may have had to sacrifice some of their heaviness, Metallica became one of the few ambassadors for what metal stood for in the public eye.
