Metallica New Album: 10 Old-School Thrash Lessons They Need To Relearn

The ballad: what arguably resurrected and killed Metallica. While the band had been called "sellouts" from the minute they picked up an acoustic guitar, some of the band's ballads have ended up becoming some of the best (and worst) songs of their entire career. There's plenty to enjoy in the band's slower material, but the band have seemed to go from one extreme to the other in recent years.

For most of the '80s, you had some of the more classical pieces by Cliff Burton peppered throughout the track list, from the intro to "Damage Inc" to virtually everything on "To Live is to Die," but with the past few releases, Metallica doesn't really know what to do with their ballads. As opposed to Load and Reload which virtually had a ballad as every other track, releases like St. Anger and Hardwired don't really have any true ballads to speak of. Though we have seen more downtempo material, they always arrive in passing, like the verses of "The Day That Never Comes" or the weird noodling on the beginning of "Man UNKind."

There was always a defiant attitude when Metallica put out a ballad, but at this point, it just seems like they're too scared to release a true slowburn for fear of pushback from their fans. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be "Nothing Else Matters," but it might be able to reach the heights of something like "Sanitarium" once again.