St. Anger is a masterpiece

Metallica's much-maligned eighth album should be judged in the context of everything else Metallica has ever released

I started writing this piece in March 2020 as a way of distracting myself from the impending doom of the imploding world but didn’t get the opportunity to finish it since we ended up getting a wine man who could deliver within 12 hours of ordering a crate.

With Metallica releasing a new track, ‘Lux Æterna’, ahead of their new album, ‘72 Seasons’, in April, I thought it would be a good opportunity to re-visit this. It’s about twice as long as what I normally aim to write, so put your feet up.

St. Anger sounds rubbish now, and it sounded rubbish when it came out, but when considering what it is that Metallica has done throughout their career, it’s right at home and is actually a triumph of sorts.

Thanks for reading/subscribing, because this take might test a lot of people’s patience!

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Is it fun to dump on ‘St. Anger’? Yes. Is it fair to dump on ‘St. Anger’? Also, yes. But with the benefit of two decades of hindsight, it’s possible to see the bigger picture and to actually, maybe - just maybe - appreciate what is objectively Metallica’s worst album as a work of high art. 

It’s possible that ‘St. Anger’ is the most Metallica Metallica album. It might even be more quintessentially Metallica than ‘Metallica’ by Metallica.

Yes, the headline is clickbait. But if you stick with it to the end, you too may end up evangelizing about that fucking snare drum and why Metallica are secret avant-garde geniuses.

There’s an ideology that Frank Zappa used to discuss in which he describes the thread that links all of his work as “conceptual continuity”. 

In his own words: “The conceptual continuity is this: everything, even this interview, is part of what I do for, let's call it, my entertainment work… as far as I'm concerned, it's all part of the same continuity. It's all one piece”.

Fans of the moustachio’d one with nothing better to do have wasted their lives searching high and low for hidden meaning and links between songs on the 62 albums that he released during the course of his life, in the expectation that Zappa’s work was conceived from the outset as a singular work. The reason their searches are fruitless is because when Zappa talks about conceptual continuity, what he’s talking about is context.

It’s the conceptual continuity of Metallica’s entire discography that holds the key to St. Anger’s beauty.

On its own, ‘St. Anger’ is a terribly mixed, conceptually flawed, poorly-executed collection of badly-written songs. However, in the wider context of Metallica’s back catalogue, and in the context of what was happening in contemporary music in 2003, it should be considered an experimental masterpiece.

If you were to take a journey through Metallica’s discography, what you’ll see is a band that has experimented and pushed the envelope in different ways on each and every single album. There’s high concept at the heart of each of their albums.

‘Kill ‘Em All’, their first album, comes from the time where Thrash was being born. Metallica wanted to be faster than Discharge and louder than Motörhead. They were definitely faster than Discharge, and all other heavy music at this time. Conceptually speaking, the album was an artistic success.

To differentiate themselves from the rest of the burgeoning underground Thrash scene, ‘Ride The Lightning’ was recorded in Denmark and produced by Flemming Rasmussen. These days, high quality recording equipment is prevalent in studios all over the world - but more crucially, the proliferation of production knowledge that exists today simply wasn’t there in the underground metal world of San Francisco in 1984. The concept here was to put their underground scene into the sonic context of more mainstream metal bands of the time. Mission accomplished.

Recording ‘Master of Puppets’, late 1985

Having cemented themselves as kings of the Thrash scene with ‘Ride The Lightning’, ‘Master Of Puppets’ was Metallica shouting to the wider metal world that their underground, niche sub-genre was worthy of rubbing shoulders with established greats like Iron Maiden. It’s not only one of the best Thrash albums of all time, but easily in the top 10 best metal albums of all time. 

Based on what they set out to do, it’s yet another success.

After tragically losing Cliff Burton while touring ‘Master Of Puppets’, the lead-up to their next album was a time of great turmoil for Metallica. Overall the compositions are much more complex than Thrash had seen at this point - taking the genre to its creative extreme, and logical end point. While it’s popular to lament the lack of bass in the mix on ‘And Justice For All…’, it’s arguably an artistic decision that reflects the loss of a massive creative influence within the band.

By 1991, Metallica had conquered Thrash, reached the highest heights of the wider heavy metal world, and pushed the genre they popularized to its theoretical limits. The next step? Sell as many records as humanly possible.

The self-titled album, or The Black Album, went to number 1 in eight different countries, and was top 10 in a further seven. A month later, Nirvana released ‘Nevermind’ - an album that is popularly described as having killed off heavy metal. And while this may be true in a pop culture sense, the commercial story is very different.

In their 31 years of existence, The Black Album has sold more copies throughout the world than ‘Nevermind’ has. In fact, it is the eighteenth best-selling album in the world of all time. That’s even more certifiable sales than ‘Abbey Road’. This isn’t just one of the biggest metal albums of all time, it’s one of the biggest albums. Period.

And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer - Hans Gruber

While ‘Nevermind’ caused a shift in pop culture that launched the wave of alt-rock that was prevalent and mainstream in North America in the 90s, Metallica’s return with ‘Load’ showed that they were able to play the game by the new rules that had supposedly wiped their kind out.

It might not be popular among die-hard supporters of the band, but ‘Load’, with its alt-rock tinged sounds was initially more successful than The Black Album - topping the charts in 17 countries and eventually going platinum 21 times.

If ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’ was the old metal band playing what was hot at the time through their own filter, the same is true of ‘St. Anger’.

By the time the stench of ‘St. Anger’ burnt our nostrils, what was hot at the time had moved on from alt-rock and back to metal, and rather than being content to just put their own spin on that (we were never going to see James Hetfield rapping in a tracksuit), they were comfortable enough as elder statesmen of the genre to keep pushing things to extremes.

Their first tour for ‘St. Anger’, the Summer Sanitarium tour, saw support from Limp Bizkit, Deftones, Linkin Park and Mudvayne. Nu-metal was still a going concern, and although not burning as brightly as it had only a couple of years previously, it was still hot property.

Despite the troubled birthing of the album, which is well documented in the incredible and oft-memed ‘Some Kind of Monster’, Metallica looked at nu-metal and thought to themselves “How can we do our version of this, but moreso?”.

The snare on ‘St. Anger’ always gets criticism, and rightly so because it sounds ridiculous and its clanging only serves to emphasise when Lars somehow manages to drag and rush at the same time.

But as with everything when it comes to music, context is everything. Listen to the snare on Limp Bizkit’s ‘Break Stuff’, and compare it to the snare on ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ by Wheatus. Snares were tuned highly at this time, and Metallica would have been very aware of this, and deliberately chose to push this aspect of contemporary music to its logical conclusion.

Unluckily for them the result sounded terrible, but it shows that strand of pushing limits within their genre that has followed them throughout their discography, and continues to this day.

It seemed to take everybody by surprise when Metallica announced a collaboration with Lou Reed, but the man who made ‘Metal Machine Music’ and claimed to have invented heavy metal and taken the genre to its’ logical conclusion by making an unlistenable white noise album teaming up with the metal band that made its snare sound like it did on ‘St. Anger’ is the most logical alliance since salted butter and crumpets.

Metallica and Lou Reed commissioned Caravaggio to do their press images

Metallica has spent their entire career reaching peaks and summits while fighting off negative attention. In response to the bad reviews that ‘Lulu’ got, Lars said, “In 1984, when hardcore Metallica fans heard acoustic guitars on ‘Fade to Black’, there was a nuclear meltdown in the heavy metal community,” before adding, “there have been many more since then."

For forty years Metallica has been a band that has achieved exactly what they set out to do, and they’ve had to put up with naysayers whether they’re right (Napster) or wrong (accusations of selling out). Metallica doesn’t care if they piss people off because they’ve been doing it in one way or another since day one, and in the long run they’ve always been vindicated - they’re stinking rich from doing exactly what they want, regardless of anything anybody has to say.

With the release of their new single ‘Lux Æterna’, it sounds like Metallica are playing the sort of music they were playing on their first album, albeit with modern production. The concept may well be “Imagine if we could be number 1 in a dozen countries by playing the music we played as teenagers”.

They’re fulfilling lifelong ambitions, making shitloads of money, and clearly having fun as they do it.

The highly therapized recording of ‘St. Anger’ is almost embarrassing to watch in its cringiness on the aforementioned ‘Some Kind of Monster’, but as the millionaire metalheads worked through their issues they were clearly still ambitious despite having the kind of money that would stop their great-grandkids from ever needing jobs.

They’ve always toured, and while the intervals between albums have varied wildly since The Black Album, Metallica have always been driven to create new music when there’s absolutely no need for them to continue proving themselves to anybody.

Metallica’s UK media charm offensive ahead of their Glastonbury headlining slot in 2014 shows a modesty they have no business displaying. The amount of records they’ve sold, the fact that few in any genre of music have played stadiums and headlined festivals (of all genres) for as long as they have - the numbers back them up as bona fide cultural behemoths.

‘St. Anger’ isn’t their best album, or even a good album, but in the wider context of a forty year career, it shows a band that has consistently taken risks and pushed expectations to extremes when they were at their most vulnerable. As a stinking curate’s egg in the middle of a rock solid discography it makes everything else that they’ve achieved so much more impressive and valuable.

Metallica’s high risk methodology is on full display on ‘St. Anger’, the fact that they don’t appear to have flown too close to the sun on any of their other albums despite consistently going to conceptual extremes shows incredible sleight of hand. Metallica are truly masters of what they do, ‘St. Anger’ is just the only time the puppet’s strings have been visible.