30 MILLION PEOPLE CAN'T BE WRONG

Lars Ulrich once neatly encapsulated Metallica’s ambitions for their self-titled fifth album. “The idea,” the drummer said of the record that would come to be known as the Black Album, “was to cram Metallica down everybody’s fucking throat all over the fucking world.”

That mission was accomplished a long time ago. Thirty years and thirty million sales after its release, this 12-track juggernaut stands not just as Metallica’s most famous album, but also as a massive cultural landmark – one that forced the mainstream to take metal seriously while helping keep its flickering flame alight during the grunge onslaught of the early 90s.

So huge and immediate was its impact at the time, that it began to exert its own gravitational pull, instantly warping the entire metal scene around it. The Black Album did as much to kill off the hair-metal movement as Nirvana or Pearl Jam did; next to its tracks Enter Sandman and Sad But True, dudes in tight leather pants flicking their hair around suddenly looked as ridiculous as we’d known they were all along. Even the thrash scene that Metallica themselves helped create was sucked into its black hole, their contemporaries aware that the artistic and commercial bar had been set too high for them to ever match.

The effect the album had on Metallica themselves was no less game-changing. Beyond elevating them to music’s A-list, with all the financial rewards that entailed, the Black Album’s inescapable presence forced mainstream culture to take the band that made it seriously – even if it never truly understood them.

More importantly, it set Metallica on the path to where they are today – a band equally comfortable collaborating with Lady Gaga, Lemmy or the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra; one just as at home headlining Glastonbury as Download. Without the Black Album, they would have remained just another metal band. Instead it gave Metallica permission to be bigger than themselves. “It gave us carte blanche to be whatever we wanted to be, and to go wherever we wanted to go,” James Hetfield says today.

“SOLOS AND MUSIC AND SONGS FELT LIKE THEY JUST APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE.” 
Kirk Hammett

The Black Album’s legacy is brought home by an exhaustive new reissue. As well collecting together the countless early demos and rehearsal tapes, it’s accompanied by , a 53-track all-star covers album comprising versions of Black