10 Perfect '90s Rock Albums That Are Ridiculously Long

As the thrash scene started to find its teeth, Metallica were almost taking a strange sense of pride in stretching their songs out. By the time you got to records like And Justice For All, you can practically hear them building these songs like an architect would build a house, putting every riff in just the right place to create a 10 minute masterpiece of metal. They seemed to lose a bit of that during the Black Album cycle though, so Load was sculpted to be something much grander in scope.

While this record has been put through the ringer more than a few times by Metallica fans, the initial vision was to make songs that went back to that stretched out format. Instead of just making a marathon of different riffs though, there's a much more bluesy feel and a sense of jamming on most of these songs, as if they're trying to let the music carry them to some other place while they're playing.

This also contains one of the most epic closers in their career with the Outlaw Torn, which actually had to be trimmed down on the record from its original 11 minute run. Even if this was nowhere near the kind of heights that we were used to on Master of Puppets, Metallica made it a point to brag about this being the absolute maximum you can fit onto one CD before the fidelity starts to drop.