After the early-Nineties alt-rock explosion, bands that had made it big in the Eighties largely pulled their hair out trying to fit in. U2 went disco. Guns N’ Roses spent about 25 years chasing Chinese Democracy. And Metallica? Well, they just got weird — and, contrary to popular belief, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Neither of the quartet’s Load albums, released in 1996 and 1997, sound overtly “alt,” since James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett’s riffs owed a greater debt to the blues and Lynyrd Skynyrd than shoegaze or Pixies. But they achieved a simulacrum of “alt,” at least for headbangers, by playing with a looseness that still feels like a rejection of the white-knuckle thrashing that earned them their legend. Hetfield had learned…
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.
Things have never been easy for Metallica’s 1996 album Load, a multiplatinum record nobody ever admits to liking, especially the band’s most avid fans. In early 1995, Metallica had a “good problem”: how to follow up The Black Album, the 1991 smash that turned them from metal heroes into global rock stars. It wasn’t an easy question. Featuring their megahit “Enter Sandman,” The Black Album was Nineties metal’s Dark Side of the Moon, the moment when an already stadium-filling band became a household name. Then, in the middle of the three-year tour to support the incredibly popular record, grunge became the lingua franca of mainstream rock, forcing Metallica to reconsider their place in music.