Metallica were on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s biggest bands as they arrived at the release of The Black Album, but just a few weeks out there were still some doubts about whether they’d made the right decision to streamline their thrash-metal sound. “We knew we had something that was radically different… I was a little nervous,” guitarist Kirk Hammett told Revolver magazine in 2021, “because we did not have any sort of precedent for that kind of approach or sound in the four albums before that.”
The nerves were undoubtedly ramped up a little by the fact that they had decided to launch the record with what has been described as “the world’s largest listening party”, playing The Black Album through an enornodome PA at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden for an arena full of fans on August 3, 1991. If anyone needed a sign that Metallica were thinking big on their fifth record, this was it.
