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Sat 13 December 2025 22:30, UK
When Ozzy Osbourne passed away, tributes from plenty of artists and bands across the planet poured in, including Metallica.
On the band’s social media page they didn’t say much, just an emoji of a broken heart and a photo of the band with the Prince of Darkness attached. Not many words, but then what is there to say? Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath were the people who pioneered the original sound of heavy metal, so to put it simply, Black Sabbath wouldn’t exist without them.
All of the members of Metallica were big fans of Black Sabbath. They played together on multiple occasions, and they studied their discography like it was a sacred text. Lars Ulrich was particularly fond of their 1975 record Sabotage, saying that the way those songs complement one another and continue taking the record higher and higher make it one of the best LPs they ever put together.
“I know for a lot of Black Sabbath people, it’s Paranoid or Master of Reality,” he said during an interview with Rolling Stone. “To me, the fucking one-two punch of ‘Hole in the Sky’ and then ‘Symptom of the Universe,’ that’s where it peaked for me, and then the deeper tracks: ‘Megalomania’ is, like, a journey of just fundamental heavy metal.”
So, you have Black Sabbath who pioneered that heavy metal sound, but then you have Metallica who helped evolve it and take it even further. The band have taken inspiration from plenty of different musical outfits when putting together their thrashy and metal sound. One was Black Sabbath, and another that people might not be aware of was Rush, who helped the band put together what is considered by plenty as Metallica’s heaviest song.
The Rush song was 1980’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, a song which references the Bible’s Old Testament. Rush were inspired by something wholesome, which was a break in the clouds. “This song simply describes the phenomenon of the sun breaking through the clouds in visible rays, as it sometimes does after a rain or on a cloudy day,” said Neil Peart, “The actual name seems to be one of those traditional names for natural things which has probably been around for ages.”
It’s safe to say that Metallica weren’t inspired by the theme of the song, but did take from the riff when they were writing ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’. Meanwhile, the theme of the song was inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft character Cthulhu, specifically the book The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Considering Metallica are a band famous for their heavy sound which comes straight from the likes of bands such as Black Sabbath, it’s interesting that they turned towards a prog outfit like Rush when putting together one of their heaviest songs ever recorded. There are a number of factors which give this song so much more depth and grit than other Metallica songs, such as the droning riff as well as the dark atmosphere that seems to encompass the song.
Drawing from the Lovecraftian character that stands at the heart of the narrative, Metallica inject a sense of dread into every second of this track. This is a song that The Thing That Should Not Be itself would likely approve of, and it stands out as one of Metallica’s heaviest offerings.
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