10 Rock Songs That Left Us All Hanging

In a perfect world, most thrash fans would have rather had Metallica stop all of their original music directly after Master of Puppets. In just 8 tracks, this was the culmination of what the thrash genre was capable of, taking the hardcore intensity of punk music and mixing it in with the heaviness of Black Sabbath and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. If we ended with just this one record, Metallica would have still left us on a strange note at the very end of the album.

Compared to the rest of the songs on the record, Damage Inc. is probably the most indebted to punk rock, having a lot more speed behind it and James Hetfield shrieking his guts out before bringing it back down to a whisper to say the title of the song in the chorus. Hearing them snuff themselves out like that during the chorus might sound cool in practice, but it makes for a real head scratcher for any of the musicians listening at home. When you hear the last few chord stabs in the final breakdown, the last chord you hear is an F, which means that the song never fully resolves to the key of E at the end.

Listening to it for the first time, it almost feels like a teaser, as if Metallica is saying that there’s no way that they’re even close to losing steam. This was the start of a golden age for what Metallica could do, and we would have probably had a lifetime of great music to look forward to had Cliff Burton not passed away just a few months later.