James Hetfield discusses the darkest album he wrote for Metallica: “The heaviest ever”

Heavy metal was never going to live up to its name by singing love songs about how the world is like paradise

 

This was a genre meant for exploring the darker sides of life, and that normally meant dealing with everything from demons to war to the most unsettling sides of the human psyche.

Although James Hetfield already had a lot of internal demons to work out inside him in the early days of Metallica, he thought he didn’t hit on anything truly pitch-black until the Load era.

That’s before people go through some of the Neanderthal-adjacent tunes that Hetfield has penned over the years.

As much as he has been the true face of Metallica for years, hearing him sing about the pleasures of headbanging in ‘Whiplash’ or exploring the wonders of riding on a Harley on ‘Motorbreath’ doesn’t exactly deserve to be poured over like Scripture the same way Bob Dylan’s lines are.

Around Master of Puppets, though, Hetfield did trade in his simplistic lyrical flow for something a lot more snappy.

Now, using his voice like another rhythmic instrument, songs like ‘Battery’ fed off the dangerous side of humanity, and the title track’s references to drugs controlling someone to the point of torture led people to think a lot more about what they were listening to.

While Bob Rock eventually got Hetfield to open up even more on The Black Album with sentimental ballads like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, Load was too much for the average metal fan to take.

There wasn’t that much that had changed from The Black Album sonically, but seeing them look like GQ model versions of themselves was a step over the line.

Even so, Hetfield felt that what he came through with on Load was among the darkest passages that he put to tape, saying, “We write what comes naturally. The newer album, I think, is even more personal. There’s a lot of intensity and aggression and energy. People think it’s soft, [but] lyrically, I think it’s probably the heaviest ever. It’s like therapy for us.”

Once people get past listening with their eyes, there’s a lot of weight to Hetfield’s claim, though. While the heavier tracks of their early years were about the atrocities of war on cuts like ‘Disposable Heroes’ and ‘One’, no Metallica listener has ever been more in touch with Hetfield as a person other than listening to this album.

He had been on the road for years, and listening to him talk about his personal experiences on ‘The House Jack Built Me’ and ‘Bleeding Me’ were gripping tales about his days lost to alcoholism. He wasn’t quite finished with those confessional songs during ReLoad, either, with ‘Low Man’s Lyric’ being one of the most unorthodox tracks that Hetfield would write. After crying out in pain, ‘Lyric’ is the moment where that same man is begging for help in the rain but can’t but return to his vices.

And for all of the massive problems they confess to on St Anger, Load and ReLoad do a much better job of being put into Hetfield’s state of mind. Regardless of the amount of therapy in that project, nothing can beat the sound of Hetfield opening himself up and wishing to be accepted in return.