20 Greatest Metal Albums Of All Time

1. Metallica - Master Of Puppets (1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV-2Q8QtCY4 Black Sabbath may have birthed heavy metal, but Metallica raised it, fed it, schooled it... perfected it. Moan all you like about their often-chided Load and Reload "cowboy rock" days. You're welcome to take a swing at the endless clangy pounding of St. Anger too, and you can even hop on your high horse to chastise the black album - incredible as it was - for perhaps playing it safe. But there isn't anything of substance that any self-respecting metalhead can hold against Master Of Puppets - by 1986 these guys had this heavy metal gig fully under control. Battery fires things off like a D-Day beach landing, and for the next fifty five minutes we're beaten into happy submission by a thunderous barrage from the four horsemen of metal. 'Tallica touches on a low-slung doom-tainted vibe with The Thing That Should Not Be and then promptly drags us through the halls of insanity with the epic Sanitarium. We're marched through hellish battlefields and we're even given a little impromptu lesson about the hypocrisy of religion along the way - it's an exhausting ride, with brief respite found near the end thanks to the sprawling instrumental Orion, and then we're finished off with one last bullet to the head; the spiked fist and flaming middle finger of Damage Inc. We could complain that eight tracks isn't enough, but could you really handle much more after that tireless onslaught? The timeless double-barrel shotgun blast of Hetfield and Hammett lead the charge here, but just as much praise needs to go to Ulrich and Burton - the twin guitars build their devilish riffs and fingertip-devouring solos on the scaly backs of their monster rhythm section. Ride The Lightning was a thrashy demon, make no mistake, but Master Of Puppets was a more cohesive, more demanding and a more stylish beast, and it's the album we regard as the pinnacle of heavy metal. So which albums would you put at the top of the pile? Agree with what we've got? Any you'd switch out? Let us know in the comments!