10 Rock Bands With 2 Masterpiece Music Albums

For the hardened fans of Metallica, there are normally two separate phases of the band's career: all the good stuff in the '80s and then the sell out years. These were the guys who were supposed to be playing pure thrash for the rest of their lives, and then they turn around to making the kind of radio hits that everyone wanted to listen to. Even though there might be a clear split when you reach the '90s, it's still fine to have both in this case.

As the thrash scene was just getting born, Master of Puppets was the benchmark for what the genre should be, combining the core sounds of metal with the speediness of punk rock and stretching songs out over epic runtimes. While a song like Master of Puppets might be 8 minutes, it never lets up throughout that runtime, giving you a different hook every few minutes. When the band eventually started talking to producer Bob Rock though, the Black Album is where they started to harness that energy into something a little more user friendly.

While the teeth on songs like Enter Sandman might not be as sharp as something off of Master of Puppets or Ride the Lightning, the production and the songwriting jumped up a notch, from the orchestral sweeps on James Hetfield's Nothing Else Matters to smashing you in the face with a hammer on Sad But True. The rest of Metallica's career from the late '90s onward can be a bit questionable, but turning metal into a household name is far from a bad thing.