Hot off of the meteoric success of 1984’s Ride The Lightning, the boys in Metallica — singer/guitarist James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Cliff Burton and drummer Lars Ulrich — found themselves in a curious position. Bursting with fiery ambition and lofty compositional ideas, by the summer of 1985, they had effectively outgrown thrash, just as that very scene had begun to explode.
But they were never going to abandon their roots; the goal was always to push themselves and indeed, the entire genre, forward. Their third album would be a crucible in which they would forge all of the speed and aggression of their first two releases with vibrant new melodies, incisive lyrics and riffs so tasty they stuck to the roof of your mouth. Today, the Master Of Puppets album is viewed as the unqualified high point for a band whose career plays out as a series of high points - and nothing exemplifies its brilliance as perfectly as the album’s anthemic title track.
