Metallica: Ranking Every Album’s Last Song
Closing with the biggest bangs of all.
As the old saying goes, "It's how you leave 'em, folks..."
The final song on an album is one of the most important, if not the most important. It has to be good enough to be worth sitting through the entire rest of the record for and has to leave a lasting impression on the listener. After all, you want them to come back, right?
One band who know a thing or two about closing tracks are Metallica. The thrash metal giants have had to figure out how to close a studio album ten times across their illustrious careers, so you'd figure they'd be pretty good at it by now.
But which one is the best? Which one leaves the best aftertaste? And which ones should probably have been left off the record entirely, let alone kept away from the final spot?
To find out, we've rounded up the final songs on the standard editions of all ten of Metallica's studio albums. Just to clarify, you won't find any Garage Inc. or S&M on here, although that live version of "Battery" does deserve a shoutout.
Will our final entry leave you satisfied? Let's plug in and find out.
10. All Within My Hands - St. Anger
Metallica's much maligned eighth album St. Anger is a radical departure from their usual sound. For a start, it has no guitar solos, which is a bit like being a zoo with no animals in it. It also heavily features a steel snare drum and was recorded deliberately roughly to give it a rawer, more intimate sound.
Sometimes this actually works, but other times it's really really annoying. Exhibit A - the album's final track, "All Within My Hands".
Whilst the steel snare was a neat touch at the start of the record, by the time you've sat through over an hour of it, it starts to grate. It makes an ungodly din throughout the song, being smashed into oblivion by Lars Ulrich as if he were playing some demented version of Whack-A-Mole.
James Hetfield's frantic singing is meant to reflect his tortured mental state, but comes across more like a drunken uncle attempting to sing screamo at karaoke. Oh, and the thing is nearly nine minutes long.
Whilst it might have been fine if it was a bit shorter and lodged somewhere in the middle of the album, "All Within My Hands" is a failure of a closer.