10 Rock Bands That Saved Their Careers With One Album

The entire concept behind the album St. Anger should have probably killed Metallica. After the documentary Some Kind of Monster didn't exactly paint the band members in the greatest light, the accompanying album was the stuff of heavy metal nightmares, sporting the worst production job on any album and the band mainly phoning it in just to make sure that they had something that could keep them in the cultural conversation. Any album that notorious should have put them in the past tense, but we got a full blown metal resurrection around 2008.

Though Death Magnetic does have more than a few production blemishes from the loudness wars, this was the return to form that most metal fans had been waiting on since before the Black Album. Almost picking up exactly where And Justice For All left off all those years ago, this is the kind of Metallica that most fans were hoping for, sporting songs that were a lot more episodic in nature and could stand alongside some of their best work, with The Day That Never Comes being in the conversation for one of the greatest ballads they have ever made.

Aside from just the sound of the record, you can also hear James Hetfield going for something a lot more visceral with his lyrics, getting in on different wordplay on tracks like All Nightmare Long and having a grip on his own mortality for tracks like That Was Just Your Life or My Apocalypse. We only have so much time on this Earth, and Metallica made damn sure that they weren't going to leave us with St. Anger as their final statement.