Master of Puppets

Metallica recorded this album at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen across the autumn and winter of 1985, and for the duration of the sessions they barely saw daylight. Lars Ulrich later said the band would start at seven in the evening and work until four or five in the morning, and since Copenhagen in November goes dark by mid-afternoon, they lived for months in near-total darkness. That nocturnal intensity is embedded in the record's DNA.

The result is the most technically sophisticated and emotionally crushing album in the thrash metal canon. If you have never heard heavy metal and want to understand what the genre can achieve at its highest level, this is the place to start. The music is enormous in the most literal sense, guitars tuned low and layered thick, Lars Ulrich's drumming both precise and relentless, and James Hetfield's riffs churning forward with the mechanical inevitability that the album's title implies. The themes circle addiction and control and the manipulation of the powerless, translated into music that feels physically imposing from the opening seconds.

Bassist Cliff Burton, who was classically trained and brought orchestral thinking to the rhythm section, wrote the atmospheric middle section of "Orion" entirely on his own, and Kirk Hammett has said Burton simply claimed a guitar solo for himself and turned it into a bass melody. Burton died in a tour bus accident in Sweden seven months after the album's release, making this his final recorded work. The band has never quite sounded like this again, and the absence of him makes the album carry a weight beyond its already considerable musical one.