yeah, I went there

Metallica – St. Anger (2003)
A Heaviness That Devours Itself and Spits Out Art-Rock Noise

Oh, you hate this record? Well, congratulations, you’re in the majority, a grand old peanut gallery of Metallica lifers screaming betrayal like this is some golden calf being torched instead of four grizzled, battle-scarred old dudes beating the absolute hell out of their instruments in a warehouse like they’re trapped in an existential horror film where the walls keep closing in. You wanted crisp, surgical thrash? Polished hard rock? Tough break.

Because St. Anger isn’t a metal album. It’s a destruction of a metal album. It’s what happens when you shake all the parts loose and let them smash into each other with no producer telling you to clean it up. The riffs aren’t sharp; they’re blunt-force trauma. The songs? All edges, no polish, rolling downhill like a bag of hammers. And the snare drum—Lars’ infamous garbage-can lid—is the ghost in the machine, the thing that turns it all from failed thrash revival into a mantra of tension. The drum doesn’t hold the groove, it disrupts it, forces you to hear it wrong, like some lost No Wave record trying to claw its way into the mainstream against its will.

This album is metal’s nervous breakdown. It’s Metallica’s Metal Machine Music, but instead of drones and feedback loops, it’s overlong, relentless pummeling, the sound of a band eating itself alive. And here’s the thing—if you stop waiting for it to resolve, if you let go of the expectation that it’ll “work” the way rock albums are supposed to work, it does work. It’s a glorious mess, a brutalist, concrete-wall slab of a record where all the wrong choices become the right ones if you stop fighting them.

My friend Zirp and I got this right away—this was noise rock, not metal, and if you opened your ears, you’d hear it. You’d hear The Jesus Lizard in the repetitive chug, Flipper in the unrelenting refusal to groove, Public Image Ltd. in the sheer obstinacy of the whole thing. Avant-rock dressed as failed heavy metal. If you were there expecting Master of Puppets 2, you were doomed. If you were there for the sound of a band being pulverized by their own history, St. Anger was fantastic.

So yeah—maybe it’s trash. But like all great trash, it’s also treasure.