“Going out and playing Justice live, the songs were eight, nine, 10 minutes long.” The Black Album was the polar opposite. “There was a lot of ego and showing off on Justice,” says Hetfield. “The band’s breakneck tempos and staggering chops would impress even the most elitist jazz-fusion aficionado,” wrote the Rolling Stone critic Michael Azerrad in his review. For up to 10 minutes apiece, its monolithic tracks marched between countless time signatures. The subsequent Justice was an even bolder test of metal’s limits. The next year’s follow-up, Ride the Lightning, controversially introduced acoustic guitars and bass solos, before 1986’s Master of Puppets became an underground smash, incorporating never-before-heard song structures and eight-minute-long instrumentals. The searing sound of hard rock virtuosity grinding with punk, it was a counterattack against hair metal’s domination of the scene. True to that spirit, Metallica defined a new subgenre – thrash metal – with their 1983 debut album, Kill ’Em All. The band are commemorating the record’s 30th anniversary by releasing a 52-track covers album, The Metallica Blacklist, with stars as giant and eclectic as Miley Cyrus, Elton John, Phoebe Bridgers and Biffy Clyro giving their takes on the album’s tracks. Its third single, the swelling Nothing Else Matters, passed 1bn YouTube views last month. It went 16 times platinum in the US and has spent 622 weeks (and counting) in the US album chart. Released 30 years ago this month, no metal album since has matched its impact every parameter was reset for what such belligerent music could achieve. They seized their moment with the Black Album, as their self-titled next LP became known. Their Damaged Justice tour had packed arenas across the US and Europe. Their first music video, One, had finally earned them MTV airplay, blasting their intricately crafted savagery through every TV set in the US. Their 1988 album, … And Justice for All, had been in the US chart for a year and a half. B y the end of the 80s, it seemed certain that Metallica would be the biggest metal band in the world.
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