Music
15 years on: St. Anger, Metallica’s final masterpiece
15 years later, what does metal’s most unfairly maligned album say about the splintering of metal culture?
What life lessons can we learn from metal’s most unfairly maligned album?
Poptimism Gone Wrong is a column that looks at the stories we tell about music, the albums we love to hate, and asks… what if we’re wrong?
Metallica's St Anger
© Metallica
What is the essence of metal? Is it the fist-pumping, anthemic thrills of traditional heavy metal? The spectacle of listening to great musicians who’ve mastered their instruments? Is it the horror-film shock and awe of extreme metal? Many of metal’s greatest bands combine some or all of the above.
For seasoned metalheads, it’s easy to forget that metal’s more extreme subgenres - from death to black metal, grindcore, sludge, funeral doom - are an acquired taste. Whether or not you’re a musician, Western harmonic tradition instills in us certain notions from childhood. A major chord signifies happiness, a minor chord conveys sadness. But a tritone - diabolus in musica - breaks those old ideas of harmony. A tritone sounds uncomfortable, unresolved. It portends of dread.
Black Sabbath, the godfathers of metal, opened their self-titled 1970 debut with the iconic, menacing tritone riff: g, G, Db. At the end of the ‘60s, the hippie dream had given way to a darker worldview, and Black Sabbath’s music sounded as grim as their surroundings - the industrial, post-World War II Birmingham where they grew up. Black Sabbath’s titular riff signalled a clean break from the popular rock music of the past into something new, terrifying, and incomprehensible to older generations.
“Satan’s sitting there, he’s smiling”, sang Ozzy Osbourne, as if he was looking into the eyes of terror itself. The song’s protagonist is doomed. But in reality, it was Black Sabbath themselves who’d summoned the devil - they had power over the music they wrote. Their sound and message connected because of their dissonance, taking them out of Birmingham into the world. Without Black Sabbath, without the tritone, there’s no heavy metal - only hard rock.
In the last five-odd decades, countless bands have shaped metal’s primordial sludge into stranger, scarier forms. But a love of metal almost always starts with our adolescent loss of innocence - with the realisation that not everything is right in the world. Dissonance sounds wrong, but sometimes it’s the only sound that rings true. You have to learn to love it.
So why don’t we give the same consideration to Metallica’s St. Anger? Metallica released their eighth studio album on Tuesday June 6, 2003 - almost exactly 20 years after their genre-defining debut, Kill ‘Em All. Metal has never been the same.
On its 15th anniversary, St. Anger is viewed as an aberration. It’s a cultural punchline, the biggest mistake ever made by the most high-profile metal band of all time. It’s a line in the sand: whatever St. Anger is, it’s what we don’t want metal to be. Most listeners agree on what it sounds like, but seemingly no one can articulate why - or what it means. It’s too noisy, the vocals and guitars lack melody, the drums are ear-piercing - all arguments that boil down to “St. Anger is an unpleasant listening experience”... but dissonance is the essence of metal!
Let’s look at it from a different angle: I think St. Anger is one of the best, most fully realised metal albums of the 21st century. Musically and culturally, it’s the rawest nerve ever touched by a popular metal band. Forget headbanging, forget whiplash - St. Anger is like scraping bone marrow. It’s even more misunderstood now than it was upon its initial release. St. Anger’s culture-wide rejection has taught all of metal - from legacy acts to extreme metal bands, to the fans - the wrong lesson. If St. Anger is considered false metal, what if it’s “true” metal that’s lost its way?
It’s easy to joke about St. Anger, dismiss it, and learn nothing. The opposite is true: St. Anger deserves critical evaluation because it’s so despised. Whether or not you agree, let me be your guide. Forget your preconceptions - listen with an open mind, and St. Anger will love you back. So, how did the most respected underground metal band of the 1980s make the most hated metal album of the 2000s? Welcome to Metallica Gone Wrong.
We took the riffs and structures of AC/DC and Judas Priest and played them at Motörhead tempos... We had this European sound and attitude but we were an American band, and there was no one else in America doing it.
Metallica were overachievers from the beginning. Kill ‘Em All, Metallica’s 1983 debut, was the first true thrash metal record. Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets, 1984 and 1986, were hailed as masterpieces, pushing the boundaries of heaviness and emotional vulnerability in metal. Metallica seemed like a perfect unit, without a weak link between them: singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Cliff Burton. Their vicious, but classically influenced compositions about death, war, and nuclear holocaust were the perfect soundtrack to the Reagan, Cold War decade. But in September 1986, a freak tour bus accident claimed Cliff Burton’s life. Only 24, Burton was a one-of-a-kind musician, often referred to as “the heart and soul of the band”.
Barely processing their grief, the surviving members soon hired Jason Newsted from Flotsam & Jetsam, and returned to the studio. 1988’s ...And Justice For All was an album about life’s ultimate unfathomability. Why did Cliff have to die young? Why were the other three spared? What is the joy of music worth, in a world with so much suffering and despair? Justice was so long and ambitious that it ran Metallica’s thrash metal stylings into the ground. By the end of the closing track, Dyers Eve, the band’s once-cathartic music had given way to emotional exhaustion. There was nowhere left to go: they couldn’t write longer, faster or more devastating songs.
So Metallica did the opposite, turning their songcraft to stadium-ready heavy metal. On 1991’s self-titled Metallica, a.k.a. The Black Album, they streamlined their compositions without watering down their impact. Singles like Enter Sandman and Wherever I May Roam had colossal, elegant riffs, that made space for more melodic vocals and creative production. On The Black Album, Metallica simultaneously came of age, and took up the mantle as the biggest rockstars of their generation. Their gamble paid off - The Black Album has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. In the U.S., it’s the single highest-selling album since 1991.
After touring and recording non-stop for the better part of a decade, Metallica finally kicked back. Load and Reload, 1996 and 1997, had some pop-metal singles and intriguing experiments, but were mostly filled with loose, undercooked blues-rock jams. On 1998’s Garage Inc., Metallica paid tribute to their influences; 1999’s S&M was a thrilling, underrated live record with a symphony orchestra.
In 2000, Metallica recorded I Disappear for the Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack - one of their least eventful singles to date. But ahead of its official release, the song’s demo leaked to file-sharing service Napster. The incident spawned a lawsuit, where at one point the band delivered a list of 335,435 users who had illegally downloaded their music to Napster’s headquarters. Metallica had built their empire on the backs of their fans, many of whom had traded bootlegged tapes of the band’s albums in the ‘80s. But it seemed like Metallica had sold out once and for all, becoming the holier-than-thou rockstars they’d spent their first decade rolling their eyes at. Jason Newsted seemed to agree - in 2001, he left to focus on his own band, having never been treated as a true equal.
In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, nu-metal was all the rage. Culturally and creatively, traditional heavy metal was at an all-time low. So in early 2003, St. Anger came with enough hype to rival The Phantom Menace - it seemed like the metal event of the new millennium. After the Napster debacle, after 15 years away from thrash metal, fans were expecting a return to form. Instead, they got the most antagonistic popular metal record ever made. Like St. Anger’s eye-popping Pushead album cover, you couldn’t look away.
St. Anger debuted atop the Billboard 200, selling 418,000 copies in its first week. Many critics hailed it as a comeback. Rolling Stone: “There’s an authenticity to St. Anger’s fury that none of the band’s rap-metal followers can touch”. Entertainment Weekly: “St. Anger is arguably the season’s finest metal offering - and the band’s best since 1991’s Metallica”. SPIN: “This is the album Metallica lifers have been waiting for: an inspired return to the complex savagery of old.” But at a disastrous pre-release listening party, Classic Rock described what must have been many a listener’s first reaction:
It was around the seventh song that a fellow sufferer whispered: ‘There are no guitar solos…’ In fact there was very little guitar generally; it was mired in the cacophonous, tinny wail of drums and Hetfield’s unbalanced bark... There has to be a reason that Lars has chosen to swamp every other instrument with his, and that Hetfield has decided to forego lyrics and instead spout inanities and slogans. This, you reason, must be the sound of a mid-life crisis. It’s unfettered hell-for-leather nonsense pretty much from beginning to end.
The reactions soon turned sour. St. Anger was the first Metallica record that was obsessively dissected by fans on the internet: on forums, fansites, and Blabbermouth - metal’s own gossip rag. But once Metallica’s fellow musicians began to publicly turn on the album, the cat was out of the bag. St. Anger sold six million copies worldwide, but was still considered a commercial flop. By the end of the year, sales had staggered to a halt.
In the years since, many have framed St. Anger as - much like The Phantom Menace - a hype-fuelled turkey that fans and critics initially deluded themselves into liking. The emperors had no clothes. Kirk Hammett had to explain the lack of guitar solos; Lars Ulrich’s spent years justifying, and joking about the snare sound. But is hindsight always 20/20? What if the critics - and Metallica themselves - were right the first time?
Let’s address some of the most common misconceptions. Yes, St. Anger sounds unlike any other Metallica album - or any other metal album, period. But was that a mistake? No, it was intentional - and that makes all the difference.
The missing bass guitar on ...And Justice For All may have been a disservice to Jason Newsted, but it was a deliberate creative choice. Justice was an album about grief - it was supposed to sound brittle, as if the life and colour had been drained from the music. Thanks to Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Metallica, we can now listen to mixes of Justice with full bass, or even Newsted’s isolated bass tracks. They sound more conventionally pleasant, but that’s missing the message entirely. Justice’s absent bass forces the listener to do the work - to ask themselves: why does the music sound this way?
The same is true of St. Anger. Consider Bob Rock’s involvement: known for his work with Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, Rock’s production polished Metallica’s Black Album so perfectly that it’s become a reference point for bands and audiophiles ever since.
Which makes St. Anger’s cacophonous production more intentional. St. Anger sounds even more colossal than The Black Album - but it’s fuelled by pure deranged id, not stadium-rock precision. Rock later called it “[his] version of The Stooges’ Raw Power” - a record that’s notorious for being entirely in the red, but is beloved regardless, and even for it.
When I heard the band in rehearsal, there was a rawness to them... The drum sound on the record is a rehearsal drum sound. It was supposed to be them in a garage. It doesn’t work in terms of the rule of metal, and the rules that people have established for that kind of genre, which basically I kicked against, because it doesn’t mean anything to me.
But unlike most punk and garage rock bands, St. Anger doesn’t sound organic - it sounds like it’s from another planet. Metal production is typically expected to be “objective”; to cleanly and accurately represent the musicians’ instrumental performances. There are exceptions - lo-fi black and death metal, grindcore et al. But for the most part, metal bands want you to focus on the notes they play, more than the way they play them. A metal album’s tone and atmosphere are one facet of its character, rather than the entire expression - like in genres such as shoegaze, ambient, noise and drone, where the actual notes barely matter.
If ...And Justice For All sounds drained of life, St. Anger is drunk on power. It has the opposite frequency spectrum - Metallica have never sounded bassier. Certain elements are recognisably Metallica, but they sound sick, corrupted. The detuned riffs are reminiscent of groove metal, not unlike Pantera, Sepultura, Machine Head. But the guitars sound queasy, like a Queens Of The Stone Age record with a case of vertigo. St. Anger’s deepest riffs - on Invisible Kid, Purify - are so swampy that they sound like growls.
Metallica had flirted with surrealism before: Cliff Burton’s iconic wah bass solo on (Anesthesia) - Pulling Teeth, the soundscapes of Orion and Damage, Inc., the reversed intro of Blackened… But St. Anger’s abstraction is ingrained in every note. On St. Anger, the band have gone from a standard E tuning to a low C, with two songs that go even further. Lower tunings means looser guitar strings, which make notes bend in and out of tune more easily. Metallica’s usual dual guitars no longer sound like one unified instrument - they’ve become uncanny. Metallica sound like no ordinary band playing in a room. They transcend themselves.
For the most part, modern metal has severed its relationship with blues. Metal’s focus on precise instrumentalism is closer to European classical music than the groove of rock ’n’ roll, rooted in African-American blues. But St. Anger bends metal back to its origins. Like early Black Sabbath, the sound of a bent, bassy string channels the murky, primal subconscious in the back of your head. Not coincidentally, two of St. Anger’s biggest celebrity fans are Jack White and Jimmy Page - lifelong bluesmen who’ve never been known to be metalheads.
Two people have come up to me and told me how much they liked St. Anger: Jimmy Page and Jack White. So if two people in the world like the record, and it’s those two people, I’m fine with it.
Heaviness is metal’s highest ideal. Oft-discussed, rarely defined: heaviness is bass plus groove. It’s not just about low notes, but the feel with which you play them.
A band’s heaviness is, crucially, determined by their drummer. Popular metal drumming has become increasingly precise, metronomic, with little room for deviation. But great metal drummers don’t just play along; they push and pull with the guitars, controlling the tempo, not being subservient to it.
Lars Ulrich is metal’s most maligned, least understood drummer. To be fair, he’s spent the last 20-odd years playing sloppily live, and the last ten underplaying on Metallica’s studio albums. But as I wrote in 2016: “Lars is the perfect foil - he accentuates Hetfield’s guitar like they share the same brain. His drumming isn’t about technique or speed - it’s about shaping the music… Even without the guitars in the mix, you can hear exactly where every riff belongs.”
…And Justice For All was Lars’ peak as a technical player, with the way he’d drive and rein in complex suites like the title track and One. But on The Black Album, Lars grooved like Phil Rudd of AC/DC - providing a stiff backbeat. On St. Anger, Lars takes both approaches at once - he’s never sounded heavier.
Listen how he moves around the kit on Some Kind Of Monster, with its numerous half/double-time shifts, each pattern a progression of the last. Or on Frantic, where he simply shifts from a thrash metal beat into the enormous verses, sounding like the reincarnation of John Bonham.
The Who and Metallica are very similar, because Keith Moon played to Pete Townshend’s solid rhythm playing, and Lars Ulrich has always played to James Hetfield’s solid rhythms. I don’t believe Lars thinks in the terms that most drummers do, I think he thinks in a musical world that is unique. He plays to the riff, rather than trying to control the riff.
Metal drum productions are typically designed to showcase the drummer’s technical prowess, and get out of the way of the guitars. Dry, with little reverb, they sound little like the feeling of playing a real drum kit in a resonant room.
But St. Anger is the rare metal album where you you can sense just how hard Lars hits the drums. It’s in-your-face, but dynamic - you get the tone of the drums, not just the beats. Even that infamous snare is a musical choice - the harmonics that ring out are tuned to the key of the song. The drums don’t just “play along” - they puncture the harmonic space of the guitars. Writer Christopher Owens compares the snare sound to the clang of industrial bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and Ministry. But Enter Night biographer Mick Wall describes it most beautifully, as “like an anvil being pummelled”.
One day I forgot to turn the snare on because I wasn’t thinking about this stuff. At the playbacks, I decided I was really liking what I was hearing - it had a different ambience. It sang back to me in a beautiful way. It just felt totally natural.
For entire sections of music, Lars makes the curious choice to leave out one drum. In All Within My Hands, he plays uptempo thrash beats without a kick drum; on the pre-chorus of The Unnamed Feeling, the snare abruptly disappears. One most metal songs, breakdowns are supposed to groove - like the climax of One. Instead, Lars plays St. Anger’s many breakdowns with toms, but no cymbals, sounding like a drunken, wounded golem that’s fallen and can’t get up. Most unnerving are the verses of The Unnamed Feeling, where Lars rides a crash cymbal, but you can’t actually hear him hit it. His swirling, disembodied cymbals just hiss nightmarishly with no beginning or end.
Some have called St. Anger, with its detuned guitars and self-loathing lyrics, a concession to the nu-metal trend, even “selling out” - the latter of which is a ridiculous claim. St. Anger has none of nu-metal’s hip-hop, electronic or funk influences, nor its top 40 aspirations - it was closer to career suicide. Writes Billboard’s Andrew Unterberger: “The lack of adherence that the most successful hard rock band of the era pays to even the most basic commercial concessions, in the name of achieving primal-scream purity of essence, is breathtaking in its gall. Essentially, it’s the metal Plastic Ono Band.”
Viewers of Some Kind Of Monster have commonly interpreted St. Anger - like John Lennon’s 1970, post-Beatles Plastic Ono Band - as an emotional purging, an addict’s recovery diaries. But that’s too simple. There is no pre, during or post-therapy album in history that sounds like St. Anger. It’s a spiritual journey into the heart of Metallica’s darkness, to die there.
If I could have my wasted days back / Would I use them to get back on track? / Stop to warm at karma’s burning / Or look ahead but keep on turning?
Frantic opens with a series of questions. Like Zen koans, they don’t necessarily have answers, or even emotional resolutions. Frantic is classically aggressive Metallica opener: listen to it tuned back up to E, and you’ll recognise those familiar thrash metal rhythms. But St. Anger is not the work of a nimble 20-something band - it’s the work of a band who spent their youths writing apocalyptic warnings, but who couldn’t save the world, or themselves. “Do I have the strength to know how I’ll go? / Can I find it inside to deal with what I shouldn’t know?”
Between the furious verses lies a calm, uneasy chorus: “I keep searching / This search goes on”... In the Some Kind Of Monster documentary, Kirk Hammett references Saṃsāra - a complex concept that, in part, refers to the Buddhist cycle of suffering and reincarnation. His backing vocals whisper in the background: “Birth is pain / Life is pain / Death is pain / It’s all the same”.
Or in other words, “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle” - a much-maligned lyric with nothing but truth behind it, and a reference to Metallica’s most poetic instrumental, Justice’s To Live Is To Die. Can one truly change? To paraphrase David Lynch’s character in Twin Peaks: The Return, “Fix your heart or die.”
Anger doesn’t have to be toxic. Instead, Metallica honours their anger, entrusting their emotions to a higher power, their creative muse - the title track’s Saint Anger. “Medallion noose, I hang myself / Saint Anger ’round my neck”, sings Hetfield, saving his own life.
We all sat around and talked about how anger is both a positive thing and a negative thing, and the message of the song is that anger gets a bad rap. It’s important for you to vocalize how you feel.
St. Anger’s chromatic riff, accented by Lars’ cymbal chokes and twisted time signature changes, recalls the opening to Master Of Puppets. On the verses, Lars simply, but mind-bendingly shifts the snare from beat 3 to 4, throwing off the song’s entire groove - reminiscent of Master Of Puppets’ notorious 5/8 bar. These are songs that don’t repeat Metallica’s past, but are in conversation with it.
Fuck it all and fucking no regrets / Never happy endings on these dark sets
Fuck it all and no regrets / I hit the lights on these dark sets
In St. Anger’s chorus, James Hetfield references the first and last songs Metallica recorded with Cliff Burton: Hit The Lights and Damage, Inc. Hetfield takes a young, nihilistic lyric, and reclaims it as symbol of healing as an older man. St. Anger’s bridge is the most triumphant moment of Metallica’s 21st century: “And I want my anger to be healthy… / And I need to set my anger free”, he sings over that twisting riff, which gets stranger every time they play it over the song’s seven minutes. All things considered, you could almost call St. Anger optimistic. The video was even filmed at San Quentin, casting Hetfield as a modern-day Johnny Cash.
But over the course of the album, the band’s cathartic purging sours. Some Kind Of Monster recalls Sad But True, where Hetfield sings from the perspective of the monster within him - but minus the thrills of being in power.
Some Kind Of Monster is nightmarish, a paranoia that never ends. Listen to the snare rattle as the clean guitar intro plays… The album’s one and only lead guitar part arrives a minute in, and it’s played out of time, recorded on seemingly the shittiest amp possible. The verses are a list of ordinary, human horrors, but each stanza ends, “This is the voice of silence no more”. “Ominous / I’m in us” - something has awakened within Metallica.
Across the album, Lars reinvents the classic thrash d-beat - kick, snare, kick kick, snare - in unfamiliar contexts. Instead of accompanying speedy, palm-muted thrash riffs, he plays them over slower half-time riffs - sounding like an oncoming train. At eight-and-a-half minutes, Some Kind Of Monster is long, but mesmerising - it truly feels like it could go on forever.
Am I who I think I am? / I look out my window and see it’s gone wrong / My court is in session and now I slam my gavel down!
Dirty Window is the most magnificent use of that delightfully obnoxious snare. Metallica have covered many classic hardcore punk bands, but this is the closest they’ve come to writing a hardcore song of their own. Built around a single blues riff twisted into various forms, Dirty Window sounds like Discharge, Motörhead and Queens Of The Stone Age all in one - but heavier than any of them. “I’m judge and I’m jury and I’m executioner too”, sings Hetfield, who’s dissociated completely, accusing himself of a crime he doesn’t know he committed. “I drink from the cup of denial / I’m judging the world from my throne…”
Invisible Kid deals with the heart of Metallica’s demons. Tuned down to a truly strange, unfamiliar Ab, we’re in sludge metal territory. Hetfield’s voice has been more powerful, but it’s never sounded fuller, bassier than on St. Anger - which is why Invisible Kid’s chorus is so disconcerting. “I’m ok, just go away / Into distance let me fade”, croons Hetfield, a terrified child shrinking into himself, as Lars’ cymbals swirl.
The bridge contains the album’s most alienating moment. As the song grinds to a halt, Hetfield channels the tone of a shrill parent’s. “Ooh, what a good boy you are! / Out of the way and you’re kept to yourself”, he sings sarcastically, mocking himself, the song’s lyrics, and even you, the listener.
On many of Metallica’s most iconic songs, James Hetfield plays both victim and tormenter. Master Of Puppets is a song about the dangers of addiction, but Hetfield sings from the perspective of the drug itself. He, and the listener, are in the position of power. But Master Of Puppets is more a thriller than a horror film; a warning about drugs that nonetheless sounds kind of fun.
Invisible Kid is just as honest, but far less empowering. On St. Anger, the barriers break down - Hetfield plays Jekyll and Hyde, switching roles from section to section. Every song sits on a knife’s edge between macho aggression and childhood nightmares. The bully and the bullied become one and the same, until you don’t know if you’re feeling the band’s pain, or its sadomasochistic joy.
My World seems petulant, immature at first: “Those motherfuckers got in my head / Trying to make me someone else instead!” But it soon takes an unsettling turn, as the chorus creates a ghostly choir out of Hetfield’s vocal overdubs. In the bridge, he’s gloating, awed, terrified of his own mind: “Not only do I not know the answer / I don’t even know what the question is!” A polyrhythmic riff - guitars in 6/4, drums in 4/4 - spins the song in a circle, leading into Lars’ most ferocious double-kick playing since One.
Shoot Me Again opens with what Dvae of the Alphabetallica podcast describes as a “fluttering” guitar intro; the unusual sound of dead notes played with a wah pedal.
“Bite my tongue, trying not to shoot back”, sings Hetfield, employing Alice In Chains-style vocal harmonies over the song’s severe, stop-start drums. Shoot Me Again is a revenge fantasy that knows violence is futile - you’re doomed either way.
Sweet Amber’s grim blues find Hetfield seduced, then tormented by his addiction, an abusive relationship: “She deals in habits, deals in pain / I run away, but I’m back again”. It’s a metaphor, but as frank as Hetfield’s ever been about his alcohol issues.
The Unnamed Feeling is, at least initially, a much-needed respite from the chaos of St. Anger’s back half. It’s the album’s most conventionally melodic, vocal-driven song - it could have been a single on The Black Album. The long intro echoes Enter Sandman, but the guitars growl more ominously underneath.
Because The Unnamed Feeling is so melodic, it’s the one song that’s most obviously missing a guitar solo. Does the lack of guitar solos date this album, as Kirk says in Some Kind Of Monster? Not exactly - because St. Anger is so singularly weird that it exists out of time. The more interesting question is, what do Metallica do instead?
A guitar solo is a song’s emotional climax: it articulate what you can’t say with words alone. But all but the most intentionally dissonant guitar solos - think Slayer, Kirk’s solo on The Thing That Should Not Be - are inherently melodic. They make the music more harmonically pleasant, which is exactly what St. Anger’s not aiming for. Instead, Metallica find less conventional ways to peak. At least once per song, the band builds to a ferocious, noise-rock frenzy of instrumental dissonance.
But other songs, especially The Unnamed Feeling, have bizarre vocal bridges. Hetfield begs and pleads: “I just wanna get the fuck away from me / I rage, I glaze, I hurt, I hate… / I wanna hate it all away!” His voice cracks, like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Like John Lennon on Mother, it’s the sound of a millionaire rockstar going through primal therapy, and curling into fetal position. Is Hetfield’s wailing more listenable than a guitar solo would have been? Absolutely not - but it’s more unconventionally honest.
“Hetfield’s sobriety dominates the album - it is the elephant in the room taking up the space where Hammett’s guitar solos used to be.”
Purify is the album’s most unrelenting song - all speed, with a truly nightmarish chorus of Hetfield vocal overdubs. By this point, the band’s grim fate is already sealed.
Tear it down / Strip the layers off / My turpentine… / Bones of you and I
Can one truly change? St. Anger’s final track, All Within My Hands, answers Frantic with a resounding no. Lars’ drums pick up speed, taking us to our final destination. By any other band, All Within My Hands would be a therapy-inspired epiphany: the moment you accept responsibility for the harm you’ve caused, and start to make amends.
But to Metallica, St. Anger is a series of masks. First, Hetfield takes off his rockstar facade, then strips away every facet of his identity: guitarist, songwriter, singer, husband, father, until he sees his true reflection in the mirror - a grinning skull.
Metallica’s entire, then-two decade career had built up to All Within My Hands. It’s not Fade To Black, a song about suicide that’s reportedly saved lives. It’s not cosmic horror, the H.P. Lovecraft homage of The Thing That Should Not Be. It’s not the cold, abstract domestic horror of Havester Of Sorrow. It’s not The Unforgiven, a spaghetti-Western tale of a boy born into oppressive masculinity. It’s not Hero Of The Day or Mama Said, two stories of redemption. No, it’s the horror of lucidity - of knowing yourself.
I’ll die if I let go / Control is love, love is control
The album climaxes with the defining lyric of James Hetfield’s life: from his oppressive Christian Scientist upbringing, which led directly to the death of his mother from untreated cancer, to his adolescent rage, to an alcohol addiction and rockstar lifestyle that only made his control issues worse. ...And Justice For All grieved for Cliff Burton’s death - an inexplicable accident that was out of Metallica’s hands, but St. Anger grieves for Jason’s departure - a mistake of their own doing.
I didn’t want anyone to leave Metallica. I didn’t want to feel that we weren’t enough… I guess the way I learned how to love things was just to choke them to death.
For 73 minutes, Metallica have barely held it together. As All Within My Hands ends, they finally let go. “Kill kill kill kill, kill!” screams Hetfield, devolving into a state of primal rage. Like the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, we’re past the point of human comprehensibility. Words fail us, then music fails us: Metallica hammers three dissonant chords over and over until the band literally falls apart, awash in noisy guitar feedback. All Within My Hands is the most emotionally devastating closing track Metallica ever wrote. It’s beautiful, disastrous, and the only possible way St. Anger could end.
When we heard the recording from beginning to end, I felt - and it was mostly me - the experience was so pummelling that it became almost about hurting the listener.
To truly grow is to suffer - to grieve the loss of your past self over and over and over again, lest you regress, and repeat the mistakes of the past. Individually, every song on St. Anger seems unnecessarily long - you could cut a section or two from each. But heard in sequence, the repetition becomes hypnotic. Breaking the cycle of toxic habits, addictions and thoughts is a lifelong struggle with no simple solutions. So, St. Anger’s 75-minute length is designed to break you; to force you into a more vulnerable state, confront the band’s demons head-on, and reemerge a changed person, whether you like it or not. There’s no other way to give voice to the inarticulable horrors inside us, those unnamed feelings - not with positive therapy, but with negative dissonance. Biographer Martin Popoff calls St. Anger Metallica’s “uncomfortable comfort zone”. It’s a trance-like state that can’t be explained to non-believers, only experienced for itself.
We’d break up the riff, extend the riff, do all of these different things and record every single one. Out of that, we’d get anywhere from 30 to a hundred different sections of feel… The whole album was about throwing paint at the canvas. It was total cut-and-paste in the tradition of [William S] Burroughs.
The album’s choppy, recursive editing creates abrupt, unnatural transitions between sections of music, as if the band’s lost in a constantly shifting maze of its own creation. St. Anger is a perfect marriage of disorienting form and content; in fact, it could be the most formally perfect statement in metal since Slayer’s razor-sharp Reign In Blood. A shorter, less punishing St. Anger wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding. Forget the superficial critiques - as it pummels you into submission, you learn to see the savage beauty of its craft, that Metallica are truly firing on all cylinders like they never have since.
More than any genre except punk rock, metal is about catharsis. It’s about channelling your rage into a productive outlet. Whether you’re being bullied in school, or feel disconnected from society’s expectations, metal pushes you not to hate yourself, but to learn to control your emotions. In metal, self-respect is not inherent - it’s earned.
As a musician, and especially a rockstar, you’re supposed to be the best version of yourself. Always the master, never the puppet. To rage against the machine, not burn yourself up with rage. With St. Anger, Metallica let it all go. The complaints were never about “bad music” - the problem was that Metallica had shattered the illusion that they were in control of their muse.
Nothing catastrophic can come from telling the truth. There might be some consequences, but those consequences need to be dealt with.
The film Some Kind Of Monster was released over a year later, in July 2004. What was supposed to be a simple behind-the-scenes look at the recording of Metallica’s new album became a feature-length documentary, shot over 715 days. Though initially funded by Elektra Records, Metallica bought the rights to the film for $4 million, determined to air their private grievances their own way.
In 2001, Metallica had hit a wall. After Jason left, they were barely a band - just three men who could see each other, but not themselves. Success had inflated their egos, and crippled their personal and creative lives. We witness Metallica argue in the studio, one moment fuelled by macho, chest-beating bravado, the next acting like spoiled children - a portrait of toxic masculinity at its most stifling. They should be better than this… right?
I am interested in watching people try, and in all of the small, familiar ways in which they fail… Three stars on the brink of middle age with their dreams achieved and more money than they could ever spend struggle with the nuanced banalities of being human.
Some Kind Of Monster is the definitive tearing down of the alpha male rockstar myth. Instead, the film shows that Metallica can be as petty as any of us. Fans want to live vicariously through their heroes, to be empowered by their successes - so it’s all too easy to pretend you never cared anyway, to to point and laugh at the band’s real-life Spinal Tap behaviour.
But it’s harder to empathise, to understand why the band had to go through collective therapy; why they had to document their lowest moments. Hetfield goes to therapy, and tentatively reemerges a year later, a genuinely changed man. They finish the album, hire Rob Trujillo, and resolve never to push him away like they did Jason. Whatever happens, at least they’re whole again. “Bands come up to me and say it’s safe for us to be human”, said Hetfield in 2014, reflecting on the film’s afterlife. He - and others - now understand that it’s impossible to live up to the rockstar ideal 24/7.
It also achieved for Metallica something that the new album it showed them desperately struggling to make would not manage to do: rehabilitate their reputation, restoring them from out-of-touch, Napster-crushing millionaire spoilsports back to somewhere closer to the truth-preserving musical vigilantes they had been perceived as previously.
St. Anger has had a truly odd afterlife. Metallica did the usual rounds, playing a blistering version of Frantic at the 2003 MTV VMAs, and St. Anger at the American Music Awards. The title track even won the 2004 Grammy for Best Metal Performance.
They played various songs from the album on the Madly In Anger With The World Tour - though the shows weren’t built around it, and they soon returned to their usual mix of fan favourites. Though over the years, the odd St. Anger track still makes an appearance from time to time. Metallica gigs are a collective catharsis - you headbang along with 10,000 other fans - but St. Anger is a uniquely internal experience. It only makes sense as a 75-minute, one-off burst of mania.
To be honest, St. Anger’s tracks have never quite worked in any other context. Billboard’s Andrew Unterberger called the title track “the craziest thing that rock radio programmers have ever been forced to play.” Even cut down to 5 ½ minutes, it wasn’t much more palatable for mainstream consumption. Some listeners prefer the remixed, more polished radio edit of Some Kind Of Monster; others prefer the raw, but more conventionally metal production of the album’s rehearsal footage. But truth be told, it’s just not the same without the album’s roomy, immersive mix. You even start to miss that snare.
15 years later, heavy metal is now in its fifth decade - and it’s become more insular than ever. Metal is no longer a counterculture, it’s a subculture. The internet has made fans more loyal to metal, yet more divided within the scene. Metal as a whole has never been more diverse, but as it’s become more crowded, each individual band stands for something smaller than it once did. Bands are more concerned with the specificity of their sound, with carving out their territory within a subgenre, than uniting wider audiences like Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden; or even a Marilyn Manson, or Pantera - perhaps the heaviest band to ever score a Billboard #1 album.
Every metalhead worships Metallica’s first four records, but The Black Album remains controversial. Many see it not as the necessary creative shift it was, but a betrayal of Metallica’s roots - as if commercial success and artistic decline are always linked.
Nearly every older traditional metal band lost its way during the ‘90s. Megadeth followed Metallica into commercial hard rock, with some - but less - success. Slayer and Judas Priest capitulated to trends, while Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath attempted to stay the course, but made pale imitations of their best work. In particular, the unfocused experiments of Metallica’s Load and Reload have taught younger bands to stick to “true” metal, undiluted by the influence of other genres. There’s never been another slump period like the ‘90s, but bands are more content to refine the same album over and over again - and fans are more willing to settle for it.
Some would say this has made metal better. Today’s records are certainly more consistent than they used to be. I say it’s heightened the floor, but lowered the ceiling.
Lest we forget, some early fans resisted Ride The Lightning’s shift to more serious themes; many thought Fade To Black’s acoustic balladry was a sign of weakness. Imagine if Metallica had listened to those voices! No band ever innovated, ever broke boundaries by pandering to the lowest common denominator. Every single time, Metallica followed their muse. To many, the biggest crime in metal is daring to alienate your audience. But if you’re never willing to risk it, isn’t your future set in stone? As a listener, do you want to be challenged, or flattered?
“Bands like Exodus and Slayer don’t do ballads, but they’ve stuck themselves in that position we never wanted to do; limiting yourself to please your audience is bullshit.”
St. Anger’s culture-wide rejection pushed bands away from subverting their own premise, from asking themselves: what if we are the villains of our story? What if the ideals that Kill ‘Em All spawned - youthful, carefree “Alcoholica” - were fated to end in disaster? But how can any artist make truly empowering music if they don’t interrogate their weaknesses? The only reason to be scared of baring your soul, like Metallica did on St. Anger and Some Kind Of Monster, is because you’re scared of yourself. If you’re not willing to fall flat on your face, you’ll never soar.
It’s not likely that metal will ever produce another Metallica: a credible underground band that organically embraces populism enough to transcend metal altogether. In the last 15 years, countless bands have been pegged as the next big thing: Gojira, Opeth, In Flames, Killswitch Engage, Lamb of God, Ghost, Mastodon… Most of those bands did achieve their potential, and make great records. But none came close to being the next Metallica. Not one aspired to be the biggest band in the world, like on The Black Album. None have ever made a left turn half as weird as St. Anger.
Metal’s produced a few recent widely loathed disasterpieces: Cryptopsy’s The Unspoken King, Morbid Angel’s Illud Divinum Insanus, Machine Head’s Catharsis - but none share St. Anger’s soul-baring spirit. But outside metal, there’s Kanye West’s Yeezus, Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band - records where icons razed their public personas to the ground, to create new growth. There’s Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music - 64 minutes of pure noise that provokes a reaction, even if you’ve never listened to it. There’s Lou Reed and Metallica’s 2011 collaboration Lulu, which ended Reed’s career the way it began - by proudly confounding as many people as possible.
And there’s Metallica themselves, the band whose name symbolises metal, who with St. Anger made the least conventional, most uncompromising work of their career. What could be more metal than not giving a shit?
It took Western classical music centuries to veer from the straight-and-narrow path, and embrace dissonance. It took critics years to appreciate Igor Stravinsky, The Velvet Underground, Black Sabbath. The most rewarding art isn’t always pleasant… at first. Many have called metal “noise”, but that’s just another word for sound you don’t understand. It takes patience and an open mind to see the beauty, the craft within dissonance.
That doesn’t mean St. Anger will ever be close to universally loved. There’s a power in its notoriety. But there’s an honesty in every fibre of its being, and that’s something you can’t say about 99% of the world’s art.
Sometimes, 75 minutes of wrongs do make a right. Nobody’s perfect, but St. Anger is.
Richard S. He is a pop songwriter and producer in ELLE, and an award-winning critic. You can follow him at @Richaod.
