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With its stark black cover and lack of an edgy title, Metallica’s fifth studio album represented a deliberate attempt to veer away from the ‘80s thrash aesthetic and switch things up after the new decade. “We had finished the […And Justice For All] tour about nine months before and we really felt that there was something specific that we wanted to do, which was to sit down and try and write simple songs,” drummer Lars Ulrich says in the Classic Albums documentary Metallica: The Black Album.
While it’s true that Metallica’s songwriting began to lean a little more mainstream on the Black Album, it’s anything but minimalistic in every other way. It has more songs than any of its predecessors, sprawling arrangements with elements like orchestra and sitar sounds, and it took more than nine months to make (recording the drum tracks alone required dozens of mics and so much editing that the tape nearly fell apart).
It was also the band’s first collaboration with producer Bob Rock, whose heavy-handed style brought tension to the process but also pushed the musicians and sounds further than ever. When you compare the result to their previous albums, you might even say that the Black Album is when Metallica “grew up”—but whether you think the album aged like a fine wine or an open beer left on top of a Marshall stack, the story is certainly an interesting one.
The earliest recordings that would become Metallica date back to “The Riff Tapes”—rough sketches of songs recorded on cassette by frontman James Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett during the spring and summer of 1990. “All the songs, from day one, were usually based around a riff,” says Hetfield in the Classic Albums documentary. “That’s pretty much the meat of the song, and you’re kind of adding things on to it as you go along.”
Some of those early riff-sketches include “Sad but True,” “Of Wolf and Man,” and “Through the Never,” but it was “Enter Sandman” that really took things to a new level. “I have a very specific memory,” Hammett told a Boston radio station about writing the song. “It was about two or three o'clock in the morning. I had just been listening to Louder Than Love, the Soundgarden album. [...] I was inspired, I picked up my guitar and out came that riff.” The original riff was a two-bar repetition, but Ulrich suggested repeating the first bar three times and ending with the second bar, giving it more of a radio-friendly groove.
The riffs evolved into songs over about two months of writing sessions at Ulrich’s home studio (called The Dungeon, of course). On August 13, the band had recorded demos of “Enter Sandman,” “The Unforgiven,” “Wherever I May Roam,” and “Nothing Else Matters.”
With the songs coming together, the next step was to decide how the record should sound, and that meant bringing in some outside help. “After listening to the Justice album, it was pretty apparent that we needed some kind of guidance,” Hetfield says. “You can absolutely tell who was producing [and] mixing the thing, you know? The drums are really loud, and the guitars are really loud, so that would be me and Lars.”
Ulrich was a fan of the low-end weight that Bob Rock achieved on Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood, and proposed to have the Vancouver-based producer mix the new record. Rock admits he wasn’t even a Metallica fan at the time, but after seeing them live and hearing their demos, he counter-offered to come on as producer instead.
“I didn’t understand the sonics of …And Justice For All, because when I saw them live, they were a heavy, weighty band and that record just doesn’t sound that way,” Rock recalled in an interview with Louder. “I heard ‘Sad But True’ and ‘Sandman’ in their basic forms and straightaway I was like, ‘Oh, I could do this.’ In my head, it felt different to what I’d heard before from them, and they told me that they wanted to do something different.”
Pre-production for the new album (tentatively titled Married to Metal because multiple band members were going through divorces at the time) officially started on October 6th, 1990. Metallica booked out One on One Recording in Hollywood, the same studio where they had made …And Justice for All. But despite being on familiar turf, it still took a while to warm up to the idea of having a producer in the room.
“The whole first part of maybe three months of the album, including pre-production, was really, really difficult,” says Rock in Classic Albums. “I think they were all a bit suspicious of me, and for me to sit down and make comments on their songs, most of them kind of went unnoticed. I’d say something, and they kind of ignored me.”
But Rock did get Metallica to make one big change: recording live in the room together. On previous albums, each member would take turns overdubbing their parts section by section or even bar by bar to get the perfect take of every note, but this time, they all laid down scratch tracks together to give the songs a more natural feel.
That included Hammett’s guitar solos, which he would normally do in the last few weeks of tracking. “I told everybody right off, ‘Well, that's not how we're going to do things. He's going to play live, like everybody else,’” Rock told Mix. “At first, Kirk was very uncomfortable with this approach, but he was game and played what he thought were guide solos. In many cases, his first ideas were the ones that we'd go back to and use when doing overdubs.”
After months of preproduction (including covering the studio live room in shellacked plywood to brighten the reverb), Metallica finally began putting tracks to tape in January 1991. Although playing in the same room helped the overall feel, the drum tracks were still recorded bit by bit and had to be assembled into a cohesive backing track before any real guitars or vocals could be added.
Knowing Ulrich to be notoriously obsessive about his drum sound, Rock and Staub took a maximalist approach and set up dozens of mics around the kit as well as the room. You can see the setup for yourself in the “Nothing Else Matters” video as well as the documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica, which features footage from the sessions.
If you squint hard enough at the grainy early ‘90s footage, it’s possible to make out what appears to be a Neumann KM 86 and Shure SM57 on the top head of the snare, Sennheiser e609s and MD 421s on the toms, AKG C 451 spot mics on each cymbal, and the unique choice of a Shure SM7B on the hi-hat. Multiple kick mics were used, along with bottom mics for the snare and toms, large-diaphragm overheads, and many room mics in various positions.
Multiple Studer 24-track tape machines had to be synced together to accommodate all those mics, and Staub had the unfortunate task of manually cutting and splicing every single edit. “There were so many edits on the tape, I was scared to play the thing because almost every beat had a cut or an edit on it,” Staub told Mix Magazine. “We’d transfer it to a [Sony 3324 DASH] digital machine at the time, and that became the master drum track, and then from there James would go play his guitar parts, get the bass line down pretty soon afterward and then do the overdubs. It was quite the construction.”
After finalizing the drum tracks for about half the album, the team switched to overdubs to give the burnt-out Ulrich a break. Next up, it was Hetfield’s turn to record rhythm guitars, which turned out to be nearly as elaborate as the drums. Once again, they went overkill on the guitar setup to make sure they had plenty of options in the mix.
“I think we had nine or 11 cabinets—some stacked on top of each other, some on the floor, some baffled off from each other,” Staub recalls. “As we were getting James’ guitar sound, he kept saying, ‘I want it to have more crunch.’ And to Bob and myself, crunch was more of a high-end thing; but to him, crunch was more bottom-end. What he wanted was when he hit the low strings, he wanted to have some length to it. And the only way to get that length was by curtaining off this small room around the cabinets, and we’d have some mics farther away to get some ambience.”
Having Hammett play scratch solos during basic tracking helped with writing the parts, but getting the performances required some coaching (and maybe some light bullying) from Rock and Ulrich. The trickiest song to nail, and one of the only solos he came up with on the spot, was “The Unforgiven”. This clip shows you everything you need to know about the dynamics in the studio during the Black Album:
After the death of original bassist Cliff Burton, Metallica suffered a severe lack of low-end. Newstead’s bass parts were all but missing from …And Justice For All, but that started to change on the Black Album. “The Justice album [...] didn’t feel very good for me because you really couldn't hear the bass,” Newstead recalled. “There’s many reasons for that, and I was as responsible for it not being there as much as anyone else was.” However, “When Bob Rock came into the picture, bass frequencies also came into the picture,” he adds.
If weight was what they were after, Rock certainly helped them achieve it. You can really hear Newstead dig in on “The God That Failed,” and he even gets a chance to show off some melodic playing on the intro to “My Friend of Misery.” But some of his contributions are more subtle, like the sharp, reverbed cracks that punctuate the “Wherever I May Roam” riff, which were made by smacking a 12-string bass.
Working with Bob Rock may have caused some tension, but when it came to recording vocals, it was all worth it. “I’d never be where I was today without his willingness to push me farther and get me to open my mind up a little more about different singing styles, different microphones, different feels, getting into different moods and things like that with the vocals,” says James in Classic Albums.
“If we can get it so one track of vocals can sound great, people are going to relate to that,” Rock told Hetfield at the time. “I tried to bring out the person, and he ended up really liking the sound. In terms of the relationship with James that I had, I think that really broke the ice.”
Hetfield's lyrics evolved a lot on The Black Album, as well. An early version of “Enter Sandman” was explicitly about a child dying in its crib, but Rock pushed the singer to get a little more subtle with his lyrics. “I said to him, ‘I think you can find a way to get at what you’re saying without being so direct,’ and that was the beginning of a wonderful friendship when we started talking that way,” Rock recalls.
The overdub phase produced some other cool elements, like the electric sitar-guitar at the top of “Wherever I May Roam,” and Rock’s son speaking the “Now I lay me down to sleep” part on “Enter Sandman”. “The Unforgiven” features some spaghetti western-inspired Spanish guitar and percussion, as well as a reversed horn sample that was “Lifted from somewhere and turned backwards so no one knows who or where it came from,” according to Hetfield.
But the biggest leap for Metallica was the choice to have an orchestra on “Nothing Else Matters.” The album’s sappiest ballad started with a fingerstyle arpeggio that Hetfield came up with while on a phone call, and although he had “no intention of it being a Metallica song,” it soon began to balloon into a massive production. Taking a cue from Brian May’s layered guitar harmonies, Hetfield recorded a three-part “string section” harmony using an eBow, but then Rock suggested a real orchestra.
Composer Michael Kamen (Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Licence to Kill) arranged the orchestral parts, but it took the band a while to warm up to them. “When we first put the thing up [on the speakers], it was like, ‘What have we done?’ And then you slowly get used to it,” Hetfield says. “I do remember the orchestra over the course of a mixing session being turned lower and lower down in the mix,” Ulrich adds.
Understandably discouraged by this, Kamen asked the band about it when he met them backstage at the 1992 Grammy Awards. Despite burying the orchestra in the mix, they apparently loved what he did, and even played him the “Elevator Version” of the song without drums and with the orchestra cranked to 11.
After more than half a year of grueling sessions six days a week, Metallica packed up and moved to A&M Recording Studios to finish up the record. Originally built in 1917 as Charlie Chaplin’s private studio, A&M is best known for hosting a marathon all-night session for the benefit single “We Are the World”, which was chronicled in a recent Netflix documentary. After a few last-minute overdubs, mixing took about a month.
Rock, Hetfield, and Ulrich were responsible for most of the creative decisions at mixdown. “We tried to expand every sound to the max,” Rock says in Classic Albums. “We tried to get the guitars as big as possible and the drums as big as possible and the bass as big as possible—you know, big and weighty. And then we had the wonderful chore of trying to make it all fit through two speakers.”
Thankfully, Rock was there to make sure the bass didn’t get neglected, but just like on …And Justice For All, the mix became a battle between drums and guitars. “Lars was a bit of a maniac about the top-end of his kick drum; we called it the ‘lead vocal kick drum,’” Staub told Mix. “It was sometimes a battle between James and Lars: James wanted more guitar, and then Lars would say there wasn’t enough cymbals.”
The Black Album was mixed on an SSL 4000 Series console, but instead of slamming the whole mix through its Bus Compressor, they tried something new that ended up having a major impact on the sound of the record. “James didn’t like what it did to his guitars, which made me have to rethink the way I mix,” says Rock. By routing groups through the SSL’s three main buses, he explains, “I could put an SSL compressor across the drums and bass, and I could leave the guitars uncompressed, which is James’ sound. That’s really the biggest part of how the Metallica album sounds; that’s why it has that weight.”
As a result, the guitars sound big and heavy without being squashed, and Newstead’s bass gives them even more fatness. Lars’ “lead vocal kick drum” has more snap than thump and a surprising amount of stereo ambience, but the low toms bring the thunder on “Enter Sandman,” “Wherever I May Roam,” and “Don’t Tread on Me”.
Surprisingly, the drum sound never really changes throughout the album. Despite having dozens of mics up, they never took the opportunity to switch up the snare sound for different songs or give the kick more sustain on the ballads. However, the close-mic’d cymbals are consistently crisp throughout, punctuating the dense mixes without ever sounding washy or sibilant.
Overall, the Black Album is a mash-up of styles that leans more rock than metal. You can still hear some of Metallica’s thrash origins alongside Pantera-style “groove metal” riffs, but there are some fantastic acoustic and clean tones, too. However, the best moments are the ones where they went all-out with the production, namely “The Unforgiven,” “Enter Sandman,” and “Nothing Else Matters.”
All of the infighting, soul-searching, and tape-splicing paid off in the end, because the Black Album did serious numbers and made Metallica a household name throughout the ‘90s rather than fading away like other ‘80s metal bands. After a brief disagreement about what lead single should be, “Enter Sandman” hit the airwaves on July 29, 1991, and reached #16 on the Billboard Hot 100. The full album launched on August 12, shooting right to the top of the Billboard 200.
“It was the right songs with the right new producer with the right new attitude with the right new recording approach with the right new timing,” Lars comments in Classic Albums. “To have one record like that in your career is amazing, truly amazing.”
Or, as Hammett put it, “It’s our Dark Side of the Moon.”
