(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sat 31 January 2026 0:30, UK
When Metallica first got together, the last thing James Hetfield was thinking of was becoming a rock and roll god.
The metal world was never going to be above ground, and when looking at the giants that had come before them, there was no way that they could ever reach the same level as Ozzy Osbourne playing eight-minute-long thrash metal tunes. Then again, fate could take even the most underground bands in some strange directions as long as they have the right ideas up their sleeve.
If Hetfield had his way, though, he would have been making the heaviest riffs possible until the sun burned out of the sky. He was more than content to stay in the thrash metal world forever, but Lars Ulrich was always pushing the band to go in different directions. Getting someone like Bob Rock into the picture was definitely going to throw things for a loop, but when listening to The Black Album, you’d have to be high to think that the band had lost any of their musical credentials along the way.
No, the songs weren’t exactly the same episodic tunes they made on Master of Puppets, but was anyone arguing with the heaviness behind songs like ‘Sad But True’. The songs were simply more mature versions of where the band had gone, and while ‘Nothing Else Matters’ was a far cry from ‘Whiplash’, no one could really touch them when they started talking about real feelings instead of the atrocities of war or someone trapped inside their own mind.
But being soft wasn’t exactly something that the thrash scene welcomed with open arms. Ride the Lightning already took a lot of flak for having the gall to use an acoustic guitar at the beginning of ‘Fade to Black’, but it’s not like Hetfield didn’t realise why people would have been upset. Whenever they made acoustic songs, it was usually to copy the likes of Iron Maiden and, even later, Led Zeppelin, but if you asked anyone around that time, acoustic guitars meant mushy ballads.
There’s nothing wrong with writing heartfelt songs on principle, but the hair metal scene had turned them into a parody of sensitive songwriters by the time Metallica started coming up. Every band needed to have their ballad on the Sunset Strip, but when you listen to the kind of tunes that everyone from Poison to Warrant were pumping out, it’s not like the thrash icons were willing to put on spandex and get all sentimental.
They could open themselves up when they wanted to, but everything that came out of the likes of Poison was practically taboo to Hetfield, saying, “There was a giant hatred for that that fueled a lot of thrash. Maybe some know the story – Metallica growing up in Los Angeles right in the heart of glam, right at the peak of glam and your Motley Crues, your Ratts, your Poisons, all that stuff was based in L.A. and we were the hated figure, but they were hated even more.”
Some of that did end up coming back to bite them in the ass, but when you look at where metal was going, there’s a reason why Metallica survived through the age of grunge. The golden age of the Seattle scene pretty much rose and fell in the time it took for them to complete The Black Album tour, and while they did have to course-correct a little bit when making their Load series of albums, they could at least get on the radio a lot easier than whatever moody record Poison was trying out at the time.
Because when you think about it, a lot of the fabricated pieces of glam rock had been killed the minute that Kurt Cobain started to climb up the charts. And in a sea of bands that were all about the fashion of rock and roll, Metallica were authentic enough to stick around and thrive when most of their peers had failed.
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