LOAD, RELOAD, ST. ANGER, DM, HWTSD

For me, it's Hardwired... For Self-Destruct, easily. It's my favorite Metallica album, period.

And Death Magnetic is the worst Metallica album, period.

Reload is easily the worst.

What exactly does yep hate so much about Reload? The country vocals piss him off?

It does have the most filler out of all the records, I'll give him that, but when the songs are good they are really good.

St. Anger has been the butt of metal jokes since 2003. Every song is bad. The entire thing is produced like shit. I still can't believe they released it.

Reload is at least half good, and totally listenable. Even the songs that are cringey to me at least don't sound like shit, and were at least made and arranged with the intention to not suck. At least the turds were actually polished.

The reason I voted for Load, is because as much as DM and HWTSD are supposed to be 'real' Metallica albums, they generally are pale imitations of the past and are the sound of band deterioration. As a fan, do I still enjoy aspects of what they offered? Yes. But they fall under 'novelty' and 'better than nothing/St. Anger.'

Load, for what it was, was the next progression of Metallica and was well produced and performed, with no need of pro tools like editing to make it so.

Nonetheless, a big problem I have with DM and HWTSD is the lack of being able to let go of the Load era. It has not gone away ever since they introduced it. Once (twice) was enough. Though it's clear to me that the purpose of retained Loadness, has to do with the loss of the ability to truly sound/perform like the old Metallica. So the 'return to form' material of the past couple of records, includes the simplicity of the Load era to replace the fact that they couldn't pop out a MOP level song (much less, album) if they really wanted to.

Yeah, no. Broken Beat & Scarred is the band at it's absolute cringiest, My Apocalypse ain't great, and forgettable mediocre songs such as Suicide & Redemption and The Judas Kiss would have never made it far.

Just because the band was playing "thrash" again (or whatever you want to call this washed up incarnation of it) doesn't mean the record was well-written. At best it was a lackluster attempt to recreate a tracklist from the glory days that felt extremely fake and ended up falling flat on its face.

Hardwired did what DM tried to do correctly, by embodying everything the band had done in the past with a modern twist, not caring if it wasn't "thrash" enough but playing whatever the fuck they wanted to play. It's also insane how much better James sounded compared to the previous record.

I could only imagine people asking what the hell happened to Metallica if that fantasy scenario took place. The production wouldn't change the songwriting.

I understand a chunk of people here really 'believe' in the past 1 or 2 Metallica records, where as I just see all that is missing and regressed from this band. They lost a lot a long the way, and I guess just the hint of past glory satiates some people more than others. But, this band has been at it's worst for over 25 years, both on albums and live. There is not much after 'the first 5' that truly competes with those 5. And in order to even compete, there has to be emulation to do so. That's again, why I picked Load. The best stuff from that, was at least an attempt to do something fresh, and succeeding at it for my tastes.

It's too bad this band didn't bother to learn a damn thing new as musicians. Seems like St. Anger scared them away from that. They hit the wall as far as trying anything different. And, as far as learning anything different, I mean, they should have looked back to Europe, where metal creativity was/is thriving, and has been for decades now, instead of looking to crappy, flavor of the year, corporate American metal trends. I dunno, they probably just became too old to get into anything new, and the same is probably gonna happen to me, it kind of already is.

After the St. Anger scare, Metallica has cashed their chips in and gone on auto pilot, and are a corporate product. They pretty much broke every rule they made for themselves, for money. I tend to not bother care about such things anymore, but, if I bothered to think about it, it's pretty disgraceful what this band has become on many levels. I keep the blinders at least half on, to enjoy the scraps I get as a hopeless Metallica peasant, with full admittance.

Like a lot of people, I'd look more forward to another Garage album than an original one. The Garage album would likely be better.

At least they do shit for charity. To me that is their better accomplishment these days.

I guess that's what happens when anything you put out turns into gold. I think that apart from one exception (that movie from 2013) everything that they have released was a gigantic commercial success. They literally put out one of the worst reviewed albums and made tons of money off of it. 


I tend to agree that after black album there is no one completely cohesive, good album, dense with high quality from start to end but I don't know man, there are quite a few songs from load to htsd that I like more that 90% of their classic era. 

Hardwired.

That's a hard one for me, Load is great, but so is Hardwired. I edge it to Hardwired.

You’re getting Load confused with yourself.

Same here! My first exposure to Metallica was the music video for Until It Sleeps.

I can't vote as I love every one. Every one offers something different that I've loved, and honestly, there isn't an album I've hated or haven't loved.
Master was awesome, but so was Justice...and Black...and Load and Reload, and all of it, lol.
I just enjoy the stuff and am glad they're digging playing so much still.