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Wed 24 September 2025 4:00, UK
A lot has been said about how Metallica reached a point in the early 2000s where they were close to collapse, and it’s often noted that in particular, their 2003 album St Anger is the sound of a band completely on the edge.
Some Kind of Monster, the documentary that was made about the process of creating said album, really illustrates how the band were at absolute rock bottom at this point in time, and very little appeared to be working for them. Whether it was personal feuds thwarting their creative process, their personal demons coming to haunt them or a lack of decent and coherent ideas being brought to the table, there was simply nothing that appeared to work for them at this time.
However, the cracks, while at their most evident during this period, had been forming long before that, and there were points towards the end of the previous decade that were suggestive of the band coming apart at the seams. Their run of four albums in the 1980s was practically untouchable in the metal world, and they hit a commercial peak in 1991 with the release of their self-titled fifth album. From this point onward, naturally, the exhaustion from having put out five great records led to some more underwhelming releases.
Lars Ulrich wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of some of the records that the band chose to release in this period, and there’s one song in particular from 1996’s Load that he appears to detest for how it just has absolutely no chemistry evident between the members. Its sister album, Reload, which was released only a year later, was perhaps even more of a disappointment for fans to have to contend with, but it was this particular album that marked the beginning of a sudden decline.
Talking about the Frankenstein’s monster approach to ‘Until It Sleeps’ during a 2004 interview, the Danish drummer spoke negatively about the track and how it came to be, and it would appear that if he’d had his way, the song wouldn’t have made it onto the record, let alone be released as a single.
“It was a song that was more put together on the computer than on the floor,” Ulrich explained, bemoaning how things were pieced together from scraps. “We had the skeleton of a song, some rough outlines, but then we played it and it wasn’t really working, and then something else wasn’t working. We tried this and that, and then it ended up being re-put together on the computer. I just always felt it was a little sterile.”
While Ulrich certainly made no bones of what he thought about the track, you do also have to bear in mind that this interview was in 2004, when Metallica were at the peak of hating each other’s guts. Perhaps his comments do have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but that being said, for him to call something sterile is a huge slant on the work that he and James Hetfield put into making the album.
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