Featured Playlist
- 16 Songs
- Metallica · 1991
- Metallica · 1991
- Ride the Lightning (Remastered) · 1984
- ...And Justice for All (Deluxe Box Set) · 1988
- Master of Puppets (Deluxe Box Set) · 1986
- Reload · 1997
- Metallica · 1991
- Metallica · 1991
- Metallica · 1991
- Ride the Lightning (Remastered) · 1984
Essential Albums
- Master of Puppets is one of the best metal albums of the '80s. It's a rare achievement: a crossover hit that compromises nothing. Much like their previous album Ride the Lightning but with even stronger material, Master of Puppets blends metal's natural aggression with subtle shifts in dynamics and expanded compositional textures to expand and refine its sonic reach. “Battery” leads things off with the unforgiving pummel of their earliest thrash, but the eight-and-a-half minute title track delivers a complex sermon on feelings of human powerlessness and overreaching authority backed by an arrangement that is cinematic in scope, displaying the group's moodiest overtures alongside its most direct attack. The playing is airtight throughout—the instrumental “Orion” is a showcase for the group's syncopated intuition—with the songs thematically united as well, offering up a world on the brink of chaos and insanity. “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” “Disposable Heroes,” and “Leper Messiah” are textbook cases of adolescent rage and frustration towards an uncaring system.
- Containing all of the thrashing speed and rage of Metallica’s debut, Ride the Lightning pours these traits into intricately structured epics grounded in sociopolitical commentary. It opens with the classic melody of “Fight Fire With Fire,” a terrifying look at nuclear armageddon, while “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a fiercely chugging examination of war with ominous harmonics. But the album’s boldest moment is “Fade to Black,” a bleak ballad from the perspective of a young man contemplating suicide.
- Metallica’s 1983 debut changed everything. Giving a stiff middle finger to LA’s spandex ’n’ hairspray flash-metal scene, guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich took their love of Motörhead, Judas Priest, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and turned the aggression up to 11. After poaching Exodus guitarist Kirk Hammett and Trauma bassist Cliff Burton from their respective bands, Metallica had the prime-time personnel to carve off thrash metal’s first—and most ferocious—album. Hetfield kicks off opener “Hit the Lights” with a throat-scraping shriek before delivering a howling tribute to heavy metal itself. Based on an unfinished song from his previous band, Leather Charm, the track threatens to careen off the rails at any moment—much like most of the album. Next up, “The Four Horsemen” is perhaps the most famous A/B comparison case in heavy metal history. Originally written by former Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine—who went on to form Megadeth—Metallica’s version features Hetfield’s lyrics about the mythical horsemen of the apocalypse. Mustaine’s version, “Mechanix,” lyrics bulging with sexual innuendo, appears on Megadeth’s 1985 debut, Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! Forty years on, the song remains a source of much debate. Meanwhile, high-velocity singles “Whiplash” and “Jump in the Fire” deal with heavy metal casualties and eternal damnation, respectively. Nesting between them like a coiled serpent, Burton’s indelible one-take bass solo, “(Anesthesia)—Pulling Teeth,” remains a marvel of the form. “Seek & Destroy,” the first song Metallica ever wrote, was inspired by Diamond Head’s “Dead Reckoning.” (Metallica covered several Diamond Head songs, including “Am I Evil?”, which appears as a bonus track on later versions of Kill ’Em All.) Introduced by Ulrich’s unforgettable drum salvo, “Motorbreath” distills touring life into a three-minute blitzkrieg of gas-huffing intensity. It’s easily one of the band’s most effective and underappreciated songs. “Phantom Lord” starts with an ominous, Carpenter-esque synth drone before kicking into an amped-up NWOBHM riff and a clean-guitar bridge that foreshadows compositions on the next two Metallica albums, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. All told, Kill ’Em All is the record that launched a thousand thrash bands while setting Metallica on their inexorable path toward superstardom. While it might have little in common with the radio-ruling songs of the Black Album—or anything they’ve released in the last 30 years—Kill ’Em All is Metallica in their purest form: savage and stripped down, angry and awe-inspiring.
- 2023
- 2011
- 2008
- 2003
- 1997
- 1996
- More than just help invent metal, they've grown with it.
- These clips capture all of the band's ferocity and ingenuity.
- The thrash legends' concerts are as varied as their albums.
- Everything and anything the legendary drummer thinks you should hear.
- The hard-riffing heroes who shaped the thrashing sound of these metal innovators.
- 2023
- 2022
Compilations
- 2006
- 1998
Appears On
- Mexican Institute of Sound
- Flatbush Zombies
- The Neptunes
- Vishal Dadlani, DIVINE & Shor Police
Radio Shows
- Hear music and artists that motivate the Metallica drummer.
- Conversation with the band in Amsterdam.
- “If Darkness Had a Son” lives up to all of the hype.
- Conversation around the band's history and self-titled album.
- The guitar duo from Mexico join Strombo to talk about Metallica.
- The artist on her cover of "Enter Sandman" with The Warning.
- Frontman Michael Poulsen on the band's connection to Metallica.
- The Colombian artist on his cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman."
More To See
About Metallica
Metallica didn’t just help invent heavy metal, they evolved with it. Formed in 1981 when a “dorky, disenfranchised” teenager in Orange County, California—Lars Ulrich, his words—placed a classified ad name-checking Iron Maiden and Diamond Head, the band debuted in 1983 with Kill ’Em All and pioneered the blinding synthesis of punk and British metal we now call thrash. Having moved to the Bay Area in the early ’80s to court bassist Cliff Burton, the band—Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett, guitarist-vocalist James Hetfield, and Burton—went on to fashion metal into a kind of art form, eschewing the glammy appeal of hair metal for ultra-serious, progressively complex song-suites that explored subjects like suicide, political corruption, and the psychological horror of war. (Burton was killed in a bus accident in late 1986 and replaced by Jason Newsted; the band regrouped for 1988’s epochal … And Justice for All.) Even as they became a global phenomenon in the wake of 1991’s record-breaking self-titled album, Metallica remained defiantly on their own path, dabbling in Southern rock (1996’s Load), high-concept dirges (2011’s divisive Lou Reed collaboration Lulu), stripped-down hardcore (2003’s St. Anger), and orchestral live albums (1999’s S&M). Their story is, in essence, the story of metal itself: a push-pull of simplicity and complexity that continually challenges our understanding of fast and loud.
- HOMETOWN
- Los Angeles, CA, United States
- FORMED
- October 28, 1981