![]() But I really felt that Metallica was my calling. We’re all close to this day, but there was a lot of guilt there for a while. I’ve known Tom Hunting since I was 16 years old, I’ve known Gary Holt since I was 17. I didn’t feel guilty about that, but I did feel guilty about leaving the band I started in high school. “They came from songs I had written, music I had written,” he told Metal Hammer in 2016. Like the title track, this Ride The Lightning album track featured ideas Hammett brought along from his old band, Exodus – in this case the riff in the verse is based around that band’s then-unreleased song Impaler. Where the debut was a blur of speed and attitude, the follow-up was the work of a band exploding with ideas and confidence. But the musical gulf between the two was immense. Metallica’s second album, Ride The Lightning, was released on J– just a year and two days after Kill ’Em All. “It was very nerve-wracking to be a huge fan of the biggest band in the world and to want to impress them,” admitted director Roboshobo to Metal Hammer, “so I was relieved to have their approval.”Ĥ6) Trapped Under Ice (Ride The Lightning, 1984) Launched with its own hoax backstory – with Kirk Hammett gamely claiming he bought this mysterious film in Russia and became obsessed with it – the band-free promo combines mock-historic documentary footage of Soviet experiments in tissue revival with effective stylised zombie apocalypse animation. This song’s video is no doubt at least partially responsible for its popularity among fans. This back to basics approach yielded dividends – not least on the likes of All Nightmare Long, a creeping eight minute epic with more pummelling killer riffs than you could shake a stick at. And so when the quartet prepared to record its follow-up set, much was made of the fact that this was Metallica ‘returning to the roots’, with the band and producer Rick Rubin citing …And Justice For All and Master Of Puppets as inspirations for the record. Anger album was difficult for James Hetfield and Ulrich to ignore. Most importantly, for all its surface chaos, the song conveyed the simplest of messages: Metallica are back – don’t fuck.Ĥ7) All Nightmare Long (Death Magnetic, 2008)Īs stubborn, uncompromising and pig-headed as Metallica have always been – and those are compliments by the way – the brutal fan reaction to the unloved St. Still, the title track was one of the album’s undeniable high points: a crunching tour de force of snatched riffs and a melee of drum sounds, poised and cleverly layered with Hetfield’s voice double-tracked spoken and sung over a riff reminiscent of Battery. Anger was the first album since Kill ’Em All that truly reflected who the people in Metallica were: conflicted, overstretched, insanely rich, and now, suddenly, immensely self-doubting. Anger is the album that many Metallica fans still love to hate – just check out the myriad memes it spawned in its wake – which explains why its scant entries in this list are firmly consigned to the higher numbers.Īs the Some Kind Of Monster documentary starkly and deftly illustrates, Metallica were at their lowest ebb both in regards to their personal relationships and their art when it came time to make their eighth studio album. In many ways, St. ![]() By the time we sat down to write the next batch of songs, we started getting into things like fear and manipulation, the idea of being trapped in situations you can’t get out of.” As we started figuring out what we were doing, we deliberately started to move away from what we perceived to be the heavy metal clichés – the sword and sorcery imagery, the leather and studs, and all that. “‘ Leather and metal are our uniforms’? I wish I could tell you 35 years later that it was a kind of pisstake, but there wasn’t a lot of irony present in Southern California in the early 1980s. “Obviously, a song like Metal Militia has a different lyrical vibe to it than some of the stuff we came up with over the next few years,” Lars Ulrich told Metal Hammer in 2016. Never mind how far the band have since strayed from their original ideals – this is the essence of thrash. Steeped in NWOBHM thunder and powered by hardcore punk snot ‘n’ bile, Metallica were the ultimate sonic kick up the backside for a flagging scene and songs like this one redefined what it meant to be fast, furious and heavy as fuck. While it is eminently credible to attribute the genesis of thrash to bands that were operating prior to Metallica’s arrival on the metal scene – Motörhead, Venom, Anvil and Accept all have a decent claim to have kick-started the whole thing – there is little doubt that the official starting point for the genre is the band’s debut, Kill ‘Em All.
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