On March 3, 1986, Metallica released Master of Puppets. It was their third studio album, recorded with producer Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen. Forty years later, the record still commands the kind of reverence that very few albums in any genre ever earn.
At the time, Metallica was a band on an impressive trajectory. They had signed to Elektra Records, toured as openers for Ozzy Osbourne, and James Hetfield and bandmates arrived in the studio with an ambition that Rasmussen later described to Rolling Stone as wanting to essentially redo Ride the Lightning, only better in every conceivable way. Lars Ulrich took drum lessons before recording. Kirk Hammett returned to his old guitar teacher, Joe Satriani. They were not coasting.
What came out of those sessions was eight tracks, average length approaching seven minutes, that somehow balanced machine-gun thrash ('Battery,' 'Disposable Heroes') against sprawling epics (the title track, 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)') and a fully cinematic instrumental in 'Orion.' The album peaked at No. 29 on the Billboard 200without a traditional promotional single or music video. Metallica simply went on tour and let the music speak.
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The record has since been certified 8x Platinum by the RIAA and surpassed 10 million copies sold worldwide. In 2015, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry, the first metal recording ever to receive that designation, deemed 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.' That is not a small thing. That is an institution built around preserving American history deciding that a thrash metal record belongs as a permanently documented part of it.
The tragedy that falls across all of it is Cliff Burton. The band's bassist, whose approach essentially redefined bass guitar in hard rock, co-wrote three of the album's tracks and influenced the classical undertones woven throughout. On September 27, 1986, while the band toured Europe in support of the album, the tour bus skidded off a highway in Sweden and flipped. Burton was thrown from his bunk through a window. The bus came down on top of him. He was 24 years old. Master of Puppets would be his final recording.
The album's reach has only grown in the decades since. In July 2022, a scene in Stranger Things Season 4, in which fictional metalhead Eddie Munson shreds through the title track while in the Upside Down, sent the song onto the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in its 36-year existence. A whole generation that hadn't been born when the album released found themselves hunting down the record.
And that's the measure of it. A 40-year-old thrash metal album from four kids out of the Bay Area can still stop a person today and make them need to hear more.
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