10 Rock Albums That Get Way Too Much Hate

For most Metallica fans, you could throw a dart at their catalog and there's a 50/50 shot that people have some strong opinions about it. Hell, ever since they "sold out" on the Black Album, some of the OG metalheads have sworn off the big Lars Ulrich monster for good. If those people thought that Metallica had sold out back then though, they couldn't have imagined what would happen once they decided to actually get a haircut.

Shedding the locks and going for more of a hard rock sound, both Load and Reload tend to be treated as the bastard children of the Metallica catalog, being just a notch above something like St. Anger and Lulu. If you step away from what Metallica is "supposed" to be though, this is a pretty nice glimpse into what they would sound like as a genuine rock band, with songs like Mama Said even having a bit of a country twang to their construction.

Going through every song on the album, there are still a few duds, only to be redeemed when you have some of the experimental moments that actually work on songs like Low Man's Lyric or Where the Wild Things Are, the latter of which sounds like what would happen if Metallica had decided to write an Alice in Chains song. This might be a little too drawn out for most Metallica fans to take in all at once, but if you were to take the best bits of both of these albums into one project, it would probably stand alongside the Black Album as one of their better records.