10 Essential Gateway Tracks To Get You Into Metal

5. Metallica, "Enter Sandman" - Metallica (aka The Black Album)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384 One of the iconic metal songs of all-time this tune comes from thrash metal band Metallica's attempt to become mainstream, an attempt that succeeded. The band hired mainstream rock producer Bob Rock in 1990 to take them from being a pigeonholed thrash metal band to a household name, and the result was one of the highest-selling metal albums of all time, giving Lars et al the traction they needed to fight the good fight against Napster nearly a decade later. The album garnered the 1992 Grammy award for Best Metal Performance and is considered a classic of the genre to this day, spawning no less than six charting singles. If we were only allowed to pick one album for our purposes of metal conversion this might be the one; it should however come with a disclaimer as the band spent the better part of the next fifteen years releasing albums in a directionless muddle that alienated many of their fans.
Contributor
Contributor

Ross Ingall is a 52 year old ordained Canadian baptist minister who has been listening to hard rock and metal quite literally since each was invented. A second career pastor who attended seminary in his 40's, the Rev hosts Too Metal For Church on Metal Nation Radio. Writing both under his own name as well as the psuedonym/nickname Reverend Rock, Ross has been writing music articles on the web since 1999.