10 Late Career Bangers From Huge Rock Bands

Death Magnetic, to be somewhat hyperbolic, saved Metallica. Not Metallica, the stadium-filling, festival-headlining touring band. But Metallica, the studio album-makers, the band that make new music people care about. Such was the stink around the band’s new output following 2003’s St. Anger. The reasons for that record’s disastrous reception are well documented. You just know that the band learned from it and vowed never to let it happen again. Metallica needed to be healthier in order to nourish the music.

And so, in 2008, Papa Het & Co., were saved. There were qualms about the record’s compression rate and chatter about “loudness wars” and guff like that, but overall, Death Magnetic was their most well received album since the Black Album, way back in 1991. Some would argue the best since Master Of Puppets in 1986, but those people are just sad that their battle vests don’t button up anymore.

This record is chock full of the kind of late-career bangers we love to write lists about, but the pick of the bunch is Cyanide. The record as a whole is said to be inspired by the band’s shared love of Alice In Chains, and Cyanide’s riff, moreso than any other could have come from the brain of Jerry Cantrell. It’s arguably, the most un-Metallica sounding track on an album on which Metallica sound more like Metallica than they had for nearly twenty years.