Metallica: Ranking Every Album’s Last Song
9. My Apocalypse - Death Magnetic
The band's follow up to St. Anger was a marked improvement overall, but it failed to address the final song issue.
"My Apocalypse" closes out the near 75-minute-long Death Magnetic in proper thrash style with quick riffs, pounding drums, and sharp staccato lyrics from Hetfield. As a song, it has some good ideas. Unfortunately, it spams them all within the first thirty seconds.
After Hetfield sings what sounds like the same verse twice, the song then devolves in a crush of noise and not in a good way. It gets a little bit more melodic towards the middle of the song, but most of the time it's just a bit messy.
The guitar solo is fine, but it's nowhere near Kirk Hammett's best. The lyrics are pretty standard metal cliches, contributing to the general feeling of "meh" this song gives off.
"My Apocalypse" is alright, a solid C+ on the thrash metal grading scale, but is that really what we've come to expect from a big ending song on an album?
A closer should sum up everything that is great about an album and leave its listeners begging for more. The only thing listeners to this song were begging for was a track reordering.