Their fifth album would be a reaction to many things, but mostly it was a reaction to Metallica themselves. Few took them seriously when they released their debut album Kill ’Em All, but their profile and credibility jumped significantly with each successive release.ġ988’s …And Justice For All sold two million copies, but the band knew its knotty, progmetal-adjacent sound was a barrier to the proper crossover success they craved. Metallica were one of the surprise success stories of the 1980s. What follows is the story of how Metallica created the album that changed metal forever. It was a product of hard graft and epic tension, nine months in the making and deeply ingrained in the memories of the people involved.

The Black Album didn’t appear out of nowhere. And I mean the world, because it’s big everywhere.” “As much as modern culture changes and morphs, there’s something within that album that continues to resonate around the world. “It’s a cultural force in itself,” guitarist Kirk Hammett says of the Black Album. As well collecting together the countless early demos and rehearsal tapes, it’s accompanied by The Metallica Blacklist, a 53-track all-star covers album comprising versions of Black Album songs by everyone from Ghost, Volbeat and Biffy Clyro to Miley Cyrus, Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan and modern country icon Chris Stapleton. The Black Album’s legacy is brought home by an exhaustive new reissue. “It gave us carte blanche to be whatever we wanted to be, and to go wherever we wanted to go,” James Hetfield says today. Instead it gave Metallica permission to be bigger than themselves.

Without the Black Album, they would have remained just another metal band. More importantly, it set Metallica on the path to where they are today – a band equally comfortable collaborating with Lady Gaga, Lemmy or the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra one just as at home headlining Glastonbury as Download. Beyond elevating them to music’s A-list, with all the financial rewards that entailed, the Black Album’s inescapable presence forced mainstream culture to take the band that made it seriously – even if it never truly understood them. The effect the album had on Metallica themselves was no less game-changing.

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