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Metallica: The Essential Album-by-Album Guide

The fiercest riffs, from "Kill 'Em All" to "Death Magnetic"

Rolling Stone

Posted Jun 12, 2008 11:54 AM

KILL 'EM ALL (1983)
Key Tracks: "Hit The Lights," "Seek and Destroy"
Quick Take: Kill 'Em All (originally titled Metal Up Your Ass) brokers an alliance between deadly adversaries: punks and metalheads. It contains the first great Metallica standard, "Seek and Destroy," not to mention the instrumental "(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth," which features the late Cliff Burton delivering the greatest metal bass solo ever, for what it's worth. But the remainder of the album reflects the cover photo of four zitty teenagers trying to look tough. Throughout, Metallica declare their endearingly cute metal intentions (in "Whiplash," Hetfield screeches, "We will never quit cause we are Metallica!") over undercooked, if enthusiastic, riff bonanzas.

RIDE THE LIGHTNING (1984)
Key Tracks: "Fade to Black," "The Call of Ktulu"
Quick Take: Ride the Lightning was a titanic step forward, codifying a format for the following two records: blitzkrieg opener, epic title track, spooky death march, slow-building ballad, three or four more thrashers, and an instrumental. Lightning took on capital punishment (the title track), mutually assured destruction ("Fight Fire With Fire"), suicide ("Fade to Black"), and, ahem, the book of Exodus ("Creeping Death").

MASTER OF PUPPETS (1986)
Key Tracks: "Master of Puppets," "Leper Messiah"
Quick Take: Master of Puppets is the apogee of thrash metal, and as thrilling an album as you'll ever hear on the subjects of cocaine addiction (the title cut), the glory of metal itself ("Battery"), and that crucial '80s-metal target televangelism ("Leper Messiah").

...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL (1988)
Key Tracks: "One," "Harvester of Sorrow"
Quick Take: Bassist Cliff Burton died in a bus crash in 1986, and the band became more solemn. ...And Justice for All took thrash to its logical conclusion: The tracks grew ever more labyrinthine, and the band became preoccupied with war, censorship, and other "important issues." The towering antiwar anthem "One" was the first Metallica song most nonmetal fans heard, and cemented the band's status as the hesher Public Enemy to Guns n' Roses' libertine N.W.A. (The album is mixed so that the parts by Jason Newsted, Burton's replacement, are almost inaudible — was the band hazing him?)

METALLICA (1991)
Key Tracks: "Enter Sandman," "Sad But True"
Quick Take: After eight years of railing against the mainstream, the mainstream came to Metallica. Heralded by the nightmarish "Enter Sandman," second only to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as the most startling rock single of 1991, Metallica (a.k.a. "The Black Album") features more lucid songwriting and better record-ing values than any of the band's prior albums: "Sad But True" crushes anything in its path. But the trouble here would plague the band for the rest of its career: Each record was filled with as much music as technology would allow. Consequently, only the most single-minded fan has any use for five of the 12 tracks — never has such a huge-selling album been larded with so much filler.

LOAD (1996)
Key Tracks: "King Nothing," "Ronnie"
Quick Take: Load accentuated the band's latent Southern-rock tendencies and included, for the first time, songs written in a major key. "Hero of the Day" seems modeled on U2's game-changing Achtung Baby: "Until It Sleeps" is strangely elegant, while Merle Haggard could've written "Mama Said." The genre experiments and Hetfield's maturing singing may have distressed unreconstructed metalheads, but the filler quotient is low, and Load is their most underrated record.

RELOAD (1997)
Key Tracks: "Fuel," "The Unforgiven II"
Quick Take: Reload consists of Load's leavings, and sounds like it. Only "The Unforgiven Two," an unbearably poignant rewrite of a far inferior Metallica hit, and the hurtling "Fuel" are keepers. Still, Kirk Hammet had definitely arrived not only as a shredder but also as a nuanced Southern swinger.

GARAGE, INC. (1998)
Key Tracks: "Turn the Page," "Mercyful Fate"
Quick Take: Throughout its career, Metallica released cover tunes on B sides and EPs. Garage, Inc. pairs one disc consisting of every one of those, including 1987's rip-snorting Garage Days Re-Revisited, with another of newly recorded tributes (Nick Cave's "Loverman," Discharge's "Free Speech for the Dumb"). Since it allows them no overthinking and indulgence, Garage, Inc. is one of their very best discs — they blast through the songs that made them what they are and have a great time.

S&M (1999)
Key Tracks: "No Leaf Clover," "Hero of the Day"
Quick Take: Garage was followed by their very worst disc: S&M (Symphony and Metallica) is just as useless as every other album on which a rock band plays their hits with an orchestra. What's worse, Hammet's playing is completely buried, so even the previously unreleased "No Leaf Clover" and the underrated "Of Wolf and Man" sound sluggish and dull.

ST. ANGER (2003)
Key Tracks: "Frantic," "Some Kind of Monster"
Quick Take: Echo-ing U2's back-to-basics All That You Can't Leave Behind, St. Anger was a mea culpa to longtime de-votees as the now Newsted-less trio crafted a com-plex riff marathon once more, this time accompanied by cathartic lyrics from a newly sober, therapy-suffused Hetfield. But production oddities — such as a drum sound that makes Lars Ulrich sound like a two-year-old banging pots and pans with a spoon — are jarring. And poor Kirk Hammett, the band's soloist and a man who has weathered the squabbles of the two figureheads for 20 years, is rewarded with no solos. Now there's something to be angry about.

DEATH MAGNETIC (2008)
Key Tracks: "My Apocalypse," "The Day That Never Comes"
Quick Take: This album was Metallica becoming Metallica again — specifically, the epic, speed-obsessed version from the band's template-setting trilogy of mid-Eighties albums: Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning and, especially, the progged-out ...And Justice for All. That much is clear from the 90-second mark of Death Magnetic's first track, "That Was Just Your Life," where the band unleashes a barrage of James Hetfield's dutta-duh-duhnt riffing and Lars Ulrich's octuple-time double-bass-and-snare smashing. That long-vanished sound, as essential to Metallica as variations on the "Start Me Up" riff are to the Stones, is all over the album. Death Magnetic sounds more like it's about coming back to life. Everything comes together on the fan-favorite-to-be "Broken, Beat and Scarred," which manages to channel the full force of Metallica behind a positive message: "What don't kill ya make ya more strong," Hetfield sings, with enough power to make the cliché feel fresh.