10 Most Important Albums In Metal History
3. The Black Album - Metallica
At the start of the '90s, Metallica were left at a bit of a crossroads in their career. After losing their bass player Cliff Burton and cutting the bass of replacement Jason Newsted out entirely on their album And Justice For All, they had made 4 albums of letter perfect thrash metal, taking every great riff they could think of and turning them into epics spanning over 7 minutes. There's only so far you can take that though, and Bob Rock managed to capture the more vulnerable side of what Metallica were capable of.
Looking to record the sound of the band playing live, the Black Album was never meant to be the sell out album that people have hyped it up to be. Throughout the entire record, songs like Through the Never and Sad But True should be enough to tell you that these guys haven't let go of their metal roots. By working with Rock's production style though, the songs took on a life of their own, which led to James Hetfield getting more vulnerable on songs like Nothing Else Matters.
After years of being called one of the biggest underground bands in the world, Metallica finally reached the masses with this record, becoming musical gods and coming through with hits that still haven't left radio like Enter Sandman and Wherever I May Roam. If they did indeed sell out here, they definitely did it on their own terms. Because even if this is a watered down version of what Metallica can do, we can at least thank them for bringing the sounds of metal into suburban living rooms across the world.