10 Most Underrated Rock Albums Of The 90s
9. Load - Metallica
Once the hair metal fad started to fade from view, it looked like Metallica were going to be the next gods of the music industry. Even when the grunge wave brought every other genre of music to its knees, The Black Album kept the thrash metal legends rolling into the next decade without a care in the world. And then they decided to cut their hair and an entire generation thought they had sold out.
It's not hard to see why Load gets that sort of treatment either, being a lot more influenced by the alternative wave of music coming down the pipeline at the time. For a band that has metal in their actual name, it's a little disconcerting to see them moving away from the fast stuff, but that doesn't mean that this record is a dumpster fire from start to finish.
In fact, there are some songs on here that deserve to be mentioned alongside Metallica's highlights, like the moodier vibes going on in Bleeding Me and Until It Sleeps being one of the greatest radio singles that they've ever released throughout their career. They may have been pulling from some different influences, but the feel is more in the vein of Alice in Chains than Pearl Jam. At the end of the day, Metallica just wanted to experiment with their sound, and what's so wrong with that?