Released: August 12, 1991
By 1991, Metallica had taken complexity about as far as it could go. …And Justice for All pushed riffs through long, sharply angled arrangements, often changing direction before a groove had time to settle. Released on August 12, 1991, the self-titled follow-up raised a harder question: how much could Metallica remove without making the music smaller?
The change is audible before “Enter Sandman” reaches its first verse. Bob Rock, co-producing with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, places the guitars wide and gives the kick, snare and bass their own space. Jason Newsted no longer sounds buried beneath the rhythm guitars. The band builds the song one layer at a time: clean picked figure, tom pattern, distortion, then vocal. Its main riff is simple enough to remember after one pass, but the entrances and exits keep changing how large it sounds. Hetfield doesn’t chase the guitar. His short lines settle into the gaps.
“Sad but True” takes that discipline further. The riff lands, stops and leaves open air before the next hit. Those pauses keep the kick, bass and guitar from blurring together. Ulrich plays a blunt backbeat, Newsted thickens the bottom and Hetfield turns each line into another rhythmic part. The song runs for more than five minutes using relatively little material, yet the main figure keeps returning through different vocal pauses, drum fills and layers of guitar. The notes are basic. Their placement does the work.
Shorter arrangements also change Hetfield’s job as a singer. “Holier Than Thou” still lets him bark at speed, but “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters” reveal the larger shift. “The Unforgiven” reverses Metallica’s older ballad design: distorted guitars and a martial rhythm drive the verses, while the chorus opens around clean guitar and a held vocal melody. “Nothing Else Matters” goes further, leaving Hetfield’s guitar and voice exposed over an open-string arpeggio before the band joins. Michael Kamen’s string arrangement shades the chords and adds small countermelodies while leaving the rhythm section intact. Neither song needs a sudden thrash section to justify its place on a Metallica album.
The stranger details are given the same room. “Wherever I May Roam” opens with a gong and sitar-coloured figure before dropping into its thick, descending guitar pattern. “My Friend of Misery” begins with Newsted’s bass alone, its minor-key line moving with more patience than the riffs around it. The guitars eventually stack over the top, but the bass remains the song’s identity. Metallica could still build atmosphere and tension. They had simply stopped packing every available space with another guitar part.
The record can get rigid. “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Of Wolf and Man” circle their central phrases until the hooks become more insistent than revealing. “The Struggle Within” brings back some thrash motion, though its tightly boxed sections are easy to predict. Across an album lasting more than an hour, a few hooks become tiresome. Directness creates its own weak spots when a repeated phrase has nowhere new to go.
So how much could Metallica remove without making the music smaller? Most of the structural complexity, as long as the remaining parts were given this much definition. The scale comes from the pause inside “Sad but True,” the gradual build of “Enter Sandman,” the heavy verse and open chorus of “The Unforgiven,” and the exposed bass opening “My Friend of Misery.” Fewer riffs compete for attention, so each one has to earn its time.
On Metallica, four well-placed notes often do the work previously assigned to four connected sections. The band could cut away the maze because the riff, rhythm and recording now held the space on their own.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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