Bob Rock turned down the chance to mix Metallica's fifth album. Instead he ended up producing it, which meant eight months, a $1 million bill and three remixes, and by the end Rock and engineer Randy Staub had both decided they never wanted to work with Metallica again. The band felt the same way about him.
Officially the album is called Metallica, but almost everyone knows it as The Black Album. It went to number one in the US, the UK and eight other countries, and in May 2025 it was certified 2x Diamond for 20 million US sales. It has been the best-selling album in America since SoundScan started counting in 1991. Rock has called it the biggest accomplishment of his professional life. Getting there took a thrash band who had never played in the same room on a record, a producer they trusted so little that they kept his predecessor on standby, and a song about cot death that had to be rewritten before it could become their biggest hit.
The Black Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Metallica |
| Album | Metallica (The Black Album) |
| Release Date | 12 August 1991 |
| Label | Elektra |
| Producer(s) | Bob Rock, with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich |
| Studio(s) | One on One (North Hollywood); Little Mountain Sound (Vancouver); A&M (Hollywood) |
| Genre / Subgenre | Heavy metal; also described as hard rock and groove metal |
| Track Count | 12 |
| Total Runtime | 62:31 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 (four consecutive weeks) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 1 (107 weeks on chart) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | 1 in Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland |
| Certifications | 2x Diamond (RIAA, 2025); Diamond (Canada); 13x Platinum (ARIA); 3x Platinum (BPI) |
| Estimated Sales | Over 30 million worldwide |
| Key Singles | Enter Sandman; The Unforgiven; Nothing Else Matters; Wherever I May Roam; Sad but True |
1991: The Year It Landed
Metallica arrived just as the American album chart started measuring sales properly. Billboard began using Nielsen SoundScan data in 1991, and the Black Album went to number one in the chart dated 31 August. It was still there on 7 September, the week the "Top Pop Albums" chart was renamed the Billboard 200. Natalie Cole's Unforgettable... with Love was the record it knocked off the top, and after four weeks Garth Brooks's Ropin' the Wind took its place.
MusicRadar later called 1991 "the year that grunge broke and that hair metal was given a shove out of the mainstream." Guns N' Roses released both Use Your Illusion albums on 17 September, and Nirvana's Nevermind followed on 24 September.
Metallica's Story Before the Black Album
Bassist Cliff Burton died in 1986, and ...And Justice for All, released on 7 September 1988, was the first full album with his replacement, Jason Newsted. It reached number six on the Billboard 200. Its dry mix and its almost inaudible bass were widely criticised, and at the 1989 Grammys it lost the hard rock/metal award to Jethro Tull. Still, "One" gave the band their first music video, and the Damaged Justice tour turned them into an arena act. Metallica then won the new Best Metal Performance Grammy in 1990 for "One" and again in 1991 for a cover of Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy".
Playing the long songs every night had worn the band down. "We realized that the general consensus was that songs were too fucking long," Kirk Hammett told Rolling Stone in 1991. Ulrich was blunter, saying the band had felt "inadequate as musicians and as songwriters" and had gone too far trying to prove themselves on Master of Puppets and Justice.
Pre-production, Demos and the Man from Vancouver
Hetfield and Ulrich wrote most of the album over two months in mid-1990 at Ulrich's house in Berkeley, using tapes of riffs from Hammett and Newsted and some ideas left over from the Damaged Justice tour. The first song was Enter Sandman. Hammett said he "tried to write the heaviest thing I could think of", and his riff came out of listening to Soundgarden's Louder Than Love. Ulrich suggested repeating the first bar three times.
"We wanted to streamline and simplify things. We wrote the song in a day or two. All the bits of 'Enter Sandman' are derived from the main riff."
Lars Ulrich, 2014, quoted in Rolling Stone, 2016
Four demos were made on 13 August 1990: Enter Sandman, The Unforgiven, Nothing Else Matters and Wherever I May Roam. Sad but True was demoed on 4 October. Ulrich has said the idea behind Sad but True went back to 1986. Nothing Else Matters was different. Hetfield had written it privately on tour in 1990, with the opening figure coming to him while he was on the phone to his girlfriend. He only let the band use it after Ulrich heard his cassette. Newsted wrote the main riff of My Friend of Misery, which started out as an instrumental, the kind of track every previous Metallica album had included.
Not everyone liked what they heard. Diamond Head's Brian Tatler stayed at Ulrich's house in 1990 and heard demos with Hetfield singing "wah-wah-wah" over drums and guitar. "I was wondering how this was going to sell," he said.
The band had liked Rock's work on Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, and at first they only wanted him to mix the album. Rock said no. He had never understood how Justice sounded, because the band were so heavy live. So Hetfield and Ulrich went to Vancouver with a cassette, and once Rock heard Sad but True and Enter Sandman he thought, "Oh, I could do this." Rock had said early on that Metallica's records didn't sound like their shows, and Ulrich's reaction was "Excuse me, who the fuck are you?" They kept their old producer Flemming Rasmussen on standby in case it didn't work.
Making the Black Album at One on One
Sessions ran from 6 October 1990 to 16 June 1991 at One on One Recording in North Hollywood. For the first time, Rock had the band play together in one room, where before Hetfield and Ulrich had built the rhythm parts on their own. They kept the drum tracks from the live takes and overdubbed the guitars, bass and vocals afterwards. Rock also changed how Ulrich played. He noticed that Ulrich followed Hetfield's guitar "much like the way that Keith Moon played to Pete Townshend", so on some songs the rest of the band followed Ulrich instead.
"Lars wanted Metallica to groove more. AC/DC's Back In Black was a big reference point as a rock record that grooved. I told him that in order to get that feel, he had to be the focal point musically."
Bob Rock to MusicRadar, c. 2011 (republished 2021)
Engineer Randy Staub said Enter Sandman needed close to 50 drum takes. Ulrich recorded it section by section, and the best takes were edited together, with 40 to 50 microphones placed around the room to catch the sound of a live show. Hetfield went back to the Mesa/Boogie Mark II C++ he had used on the previous three albums. Staub said they built a huge rig around it, with nine or 11 cabinets inside a curtained tent because Hetfield "kept saying, 'I want it to have more crunch!'" Rock turned the bass up, asked Newsted to "play more like a bass player and less like a guitarist", and pushed for the cellos on The Unforgiven and the orchestra on Nothing Else Matters.
It was a hard eight months. Ulrich remembered punchbags being installed "for fucking tension". Hammett, Ulrich and Newsted were all going through divorces. "I was an emotional wreck," Hammett told Playboy in 2001. Rock wanted Hetfield to write better lyrics, and he wanted Hammett's solos played live with the band, which Hammett found uncomfortable at first. Ulrich, Hetfield and Rock also spent about a week at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver in April and May 1991. Final overdubs and mixing took four weeks at A&M in Hollywood. The album was mixed three times and only just made its pressing deadline. After the band celebrated in near silence at a local bar, Ulrich and Rock did not speak for a year. Adam Dubin filmed all of it for A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Guitars, vocals | James Hetfield | Plays the intro and solo on Nothing Else Matters |
| Drums | Lars Ulrich | Percussion on The God That Failed and My Friend of Misery |
| Lead guitar | Kirk Hammett | Not on Nothing Else Matters |
| Bass | Jason Newsted | Co-writer of My Friend of Misery |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Orchestral arrangement | Michael Kamen | Nothing Else Matters |
| Orchestra | London Symphony Orchestra | Nothing Else Matters, per Benoit Clerc's 2023 book |
| Tambourine | Randy Staub | Nothing Else Matters |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | Bob Rock | With Hetfield and Ulrich |
| Engineer | Randy Staub | |
| Assistant engineer | Mike Tacci | |
| Mastering | George Marino | Sterling Sound |
| 2021 remaster | Bob Ludwig | Gateway Mastering |
| Uncredited | ||
| Keyboard | "Scott" | The Unforgiven |
Hammett later admitted that learning Hetfield's Nothing Else Matters intro to play alone on stage "was a little bit intimidating for me at that point." Kamen's strings were Rock's idea, and the band were so wary of them that "in the final mix you can barely hear the orchestration". Kamen later conducted the San Francisco Symphony for the band's S&M project.
The Songs on Metallica
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enter Sandman | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 5:31 | Yes | First written, among the last to get lyrics |
| 2 | Sad but True | Hetfield, Ulrich | 5:24 | Yes | Tuned down to D standard |
| 3 | Holier than Thou | Hetfield, Ulrich | 3:47 | No | Rock's original pick for lead single |
| 4 | The Unforgiven | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 6:27 | Yes | Heavy verses, soft chorus, the reverse of earlier ballads |
| 5 | Wherever I May Roam | Hetfield, Ulrich | 6:44 | Yes | Sitar-style intro was the band's idea |
| 6 | Don't Tread on Me | Hetfield, Ulrich | 4:00 | Radio only | Intro quotes West Side Story's "America" |
| 7 | Through the Never | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 4:04 | No | Gave its name to the 2013 concert film |
| 8 | Nothing Else Matters | Hetfield, Ulrich | 6:28 | Yes | Written on tour, never meant for Metallica |
| 9 | Of Wolf and Man | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 4:16 | No | Hammett's riff, flipped round by Hetfield and Ulrich |
| 10 | The God That Failed | Hetfield, Ulrich | 5:08 | No | Tuned to E flat; about Hetfield's mother |
| 11 | My Friend of Misery | Hetfield, Ulrich, Newsted | 6:49 | No | Started as a Newsted instrumental |
| 12 | The Struggle Within | Hetfield, Ulrich | 3:53 | No | Played live only 20 times, by Louder's count |
Hetfield wrote all the lyrics. According to Rolling Stone, ten of the twelve songs are in standard E tuning, and this was the first Metallica album to use three tunings: Sad but True drops to D and The God That Failed to E flat.
Enter Sandman
Enter Sandman was the first song written and one of the last to get its lyrics. Hetfield thought the music sounded "catchy and kind of commercial", so he went the other way and wrote about a baby dying in its cot, including the line "Disrupt the perfect family" where "Off to never-never land" is now. Rock remembered that once the band and management heard those words, it "didn't go over well." He asked Hetfield, "Does it have to be so literal?", and the lyric was rewritten into a child's nightmare. Picking the lead single caused a fight. Rock wanted Holier than Thou, and he says Ulrich was the only member who backed Enter Sandman before recording. The band still tease Rock about it: "Holier Than Thou, huh?"
Sad but True
When the band played Rock the demo, he told them it was "the Kashmir of the '90s". He then asked why everything was in E. The band replied, "Well, isn't E the lowest note?", and Rock told them about tuning down to D on Dr. Feelgood.
"Metallica then tuned down to D, and that's when the riff really became huge. It was this force that you just couldn't stop, no matter what."
Bob Rock to MusicRadar, c. 2011 (republished 2021)
The Unforgiven and Wherever I May Roam
Hetfield had been listening to Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" and told Rock he had "never really sang before", only yelled. Rock stopped him doubling his vocals and had him sing to speakers instead of headphones. On The Unforgiven, Hetfield said the horn intro was reversed so that nobody could identify where it came from. Hammett's solo came after his worked-out ideas failed and Rock needled him about a recent guitarist-of-the-year award. He played a new solo on the spot, and that single take is the one on the record. Accounts of the Wherever I May Roam intro don't agree. One version has a sitar and a Warwick twelve-string bass, another a Coral electric sitar and a twelve-string Hamer played by Newsted. Either way, Rock said: "I wish I could take credit for the sitar, but it was the band's idea."
Nothing Else Matters
For Hetfield, writing a love song for Metallica felt like a betrayal of what the band stood for.
"What was it about not wanting to write a love song? That's pretty easy. It's a huge sign of weakness. You're in Metallica. This is hardcore. What the fuck are you doing?"
James Hetfield to Classic Rock, quoted by Louder, 2026
Rock described it as "him trying to write a love song without saying the word 'love.'"
The God That Failed and My Friend of Misery
The God That Failed is about Hetfield's mother, who died of cancer after her Christian Science beliefs kept her away from medical treatment. You can hear him cock a hunting rifle in the last verse. Rock said it was "the song that really broke the ice between James and me." My Friend of Misery was, in Rock's words, "pretty much a Jason song". Newsted told Billboard in 2016 that it was the moment the others "kind of bowed and said, 'Here you go, man, put your song on there.'" In 2001 Hetfield told Playboy that Through the Never "was a little wacky" and Holier than Thou "was one of the sillier songs."
B-sides, Demos and Borrowed Songs
The singles were filled out with demos, live recordings and covers of songs by other bands:
- Stone Cold Crazy (Queen): B-side of Enter Sandman, first released on Elektra's 1990 Rubaiyat compilation.
- Killing Time (Sweet Savage, 1981): B-side of The Unforgiven, co-written by Vivian Campbell.
- So What (Anti-Nowhere League): on The Unforgiven maxi-single, the US Sad but True single and as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of the album.
- Holier Than Thou (Work in Progress): on the four-track Enter Sandman 12-inch.
- Nothing Else Matters (Elevator Version): on part two of the Sad but True single.
- Demos of Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters, Wherever I May Roam and Sad but True, one on each of those singles.
The covers were later collected on Garage Inc. in 1998.
The Black Album Cover
The sleeve was Ulrich's idea. He was flicking through a metal magazine and noticed that all the album adverts looked alike: "All these cartoon characters and all this steel and blood and guts. It was like, 'Let's get as far away as possible from this.'" The cover is nearly all black. The Metallica logo sits at an angle in the top left corner, so dark you can barely see it, and the bottom right has a grey outline of a coiled snake with its mouth open. On first pressings both emblems were embossed and almost invisible. Later editions print them in dark grey. The snake comes from the Gadsden flag, whose motto gave the album its sixth track. Hetfield summed it up: "Here it is, black sleeve, black logo, fuck you."
The band also struggled with the title. The working title was Married to Metal, a joke about the three divorces. Five was considered too. Newsted said, "We wanted to keep it simple." Plenty of others compared it to Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove, and Spinal Tap teased Hetfield and Hammett about it in the documentary before deciding it was an "homage". Ulrich didn't find the comparison funny: "if it came down to a choice between black and pink, you know what I mean?"
Release and Reception
Nine days before release, on 3 August 1991, Metallica played the whole album to fans at a free listening party in Madison Square Garden. Rolling Stone put the crowd at 10,000, while Louder says Elektra gave away 19,000 tickets. Hetfield spent the night "waiting for 'Nothing Else Matters' to come on... to see if these people just look at each other and throw up!" They didn't. Estimates of first-week US sales range from 598,000 to more than 650,000, and the album went platinum within two weeks.
In Rolling Stone, Robert Palmer said the record sounded so good that Justice "sounds almost thin" next to it. He called Enter Sandman "possibly the first metal lullaby" and the album "exemplary". His one complaint was Don't Tread on Me, which he called the album's "only sour note" because it seemed "unequivocally jingoistic". In the Los Angeles Times, under the headline "Advisory to Metallica Fans: It's a Pop Band Now", Jonathan Gold gave it three and a half stars and compared the shift to Dylan going electric.
"For the first time, Metallica has hummable melodies, hooks, harmonies on the choruses, tight song structures like the ones on Guns N' Roses tunes."
Jonathan Gold, Los Angeles Times, 1991
Robert Christgau gave it a "dud". The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll placed it eighth for 1991, and in 1992 it won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance. That gave Metallica all three Best Metal Performance awards handed out up to that point. Newsted said he "never thought it was possible to have a No. 1 record with the kind of music we played."
"I know we're No. 1 completely on our own terms. This whole thing was done our way."
Lars Ulrich to Rolling Stone, quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock, 2021
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | US Hot 100 | UK | Video director |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enter Sandman | 29 Jul 1991 | 16 | 5 | Wayne Isham |
| The Unforgiven | 28 Oct 1991 | 35 | 15 | Matt Mahurin |
| Nothing Else Matters | 20 Apr 1992 | 34 | 6 | Adam Dubin |
| Wherever I May Roam | 19 Oct 1992 | 82 | 25 | Wayne Isham |
| Sad but True | 8 Feb 1993 | 98 | 20 | Wayne Isham |
Don't Tread on Me went to rock radio but was never released as a commercial single. Wayne Isham shot the Enter Sandman video in Los Angeles in June 1991. It was the first of six Metallica videos he directed, and it won Best Hard Rock Video at the 1992 MTV VMAs. Matt Mahurin's black-and-white video for The Unforgiven also exists in a longer 11:33 "theatrical" cut. Dubin made Nothing Else Matters out of documentary footage. MTV stopped showing it in daytime because of the pin-ups on the studio walls, but in August 2021 it became Metallica's first video to pass a billion views on YouTube. Isham filmed Sad but True in San Diego in January 1992, and his Wherever I May Roam video was cut together from tour footage.
Touring: Wherever We May Roam
The 1991 Monsters of Rock run ended on 28 September at Tushino Airfield in Moscow, which was described as the first free outdoor Western rock concert in Soviet history, with estimates of the crowd running from 150,000 to 500,000. The Wherever We May Roam tour proper had no support act. Tickets read "An Evening with Metallica", and shows lasted about three hours on a diamond-shaped stage with two drum kits and a fan pit in the middle called the Snakepit. At Orlando Arena on 16 March 1992, according to Classic Rock, fans dangled an usher from the balcony by his ankles, and the band were billed $38,000 for the damage.
- 20 April 1992: the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley, where Hetfield sang "Stone Cold Crazy" with Brian May, John Deacon, Roger Taylor and Tony Iommi.
- 17 July 1992: the stadium tour with Guns N' Roses opened at RFK Stadium in Washington, with Faith No More and later Body Count in support.
- 8 August 1992: at Montreal's Olympic Stadium, Hetfield walked into a pyrotechnic blast during "Fade to Black" and suffered second- and third-degree burns. Guns N' Roses cut their own set short and the crowd rioted.
- 25 August 1992: the tour picked up again near Phoenix. Hetfield sang while former guitar tech John Marshall of Metal Church played rhythm guitar.
- 13 August 1994: Woodstock '94 in front of 350,000 people, on the final Shit Hits the Sheds tour.
The Mexico City shows from February and March 1993, along with the San Diego concerts from January 1992, became Live Shit: Binge & Purge, released on 23 November 1993 in a cardboard box made to look like a road case. Holier than Thou, The God That Failed, Through the Never and The Unforgiven were dropped from the set after 1995. Don't Tread on Me wasn't played live at all until 2012, when the European Black Album Tour performed the whole album in reverse order.
Enter Sandman in Sport, Film and Space
- Entrance music for New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera.
- Virginia Tech football's entrance song at Lane Stadium since 2000. When the band played there on 7 May 2025, the crowd's jumping registered as a minor earthquake.
- Played to wake the crew of space shuttle mission STS-123, chosen for astronaut Robert Behnken.
- Entrance music for ECW wrestler The Sandman, and for Brock Lesnar in five UFC fights.
- Included in "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Polka Your Eyes Out" on Off the Deep End.
Controversy and Lawsuits
Some long-standing fans called it a sell-out, and much of the anger was aimed at Rock. Hetfield said Rock "got some horrible death threats and shit from fans", and years later thousands signed an online petition asking the band to drop him. In 2003 it was reported that members of the band Excel were considering legal action, claiming the Enter Sandman riff resembled their 1989 song "Tapping into the Emotional Void". In 2008, leaked documents showed US interrogators had used Enter Sandman on detainees. Ulrich responded that he could "name, y'know, thirty Norwegian death metal bands that would make Metallica sound like Simon And Garfunkel." Once touring ended, Metallica sued Elektra to get out of their 1984 contract, which paid a 14% royalty. The dispute was settled out of court in January 1995.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
For the 30th anniversary, Metallica put together The Metallica Blacklist, with 53 artists covering every song on the album. It came out digitally on 10 September 2021, and proceeds were split between the band's All Within My Hands foundation and charities chosen by each artist. Metal Hammer rated Miley Cyrus's Nothing Else Matters the best of the lot. Her version features Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma, Chad Smith and Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo. Utah Saints and Chuck D's "Power to the Beats" became the first track to get official clearance to sample Metallica, and Front Line Assembly sampled the Don't Tread on Me riff on 1994's "Surface Patterns".
Reissues and the 2021 Box Set
The 30th-anniversary remaster came out on 10 September 2021. Bob Ludwig remastered the album itself at Gateway Mastering, Reuben Cohen at Lurssen handled everything else, and Greg Fidelman was executive producer. The limited deluxe box contains:
- The album on 180-gram double LP and CD, plus a Sad but True picture disc.
- Three live LPs, including Wembley 1992 and Tushino Airfield 1991.
- 14 CDs and six DVDs of demos, rough mixes, interviews and concerts.
- A 120-page hardback book, tour laminates, lithos and picks.
After the reissue, the album went back into the Billboard top ten at number nine, its first top-ten placing in 29 years.
The Legacy of the Black Album
In 2009 the Black Album overtook Shania Twain's Come On Over as the best-selling album of the SoundScan era. By 2016 it had sold 16.4 million US copies, 5.8 million of them on cassette, and it has never sold fewer than 1,000 copies in a week. Ulrich's verdict on the sales: "I think you file that one under 'mindfuck'." Rolling Stone ranked it 235th in its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums. Classic Rock credited it with inspiring 1990s post-grunge, while AllMusic's Steve Huey argued that its approach "foreshadowed a creative decline". The BBC's Sid Smith said the album took the band "from cult metal gods to bona fide rock stars".
Rock and Metallica got over their vow never to work together again. Rock went on to produce Load, Reload and St. Anger. In 2022 Rock said his 15 years with the band "were some of the best times of my life."
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| A spy in the studio | As part of the band's PR effort, the editor of Rip magazine was invited to sit in on the recording sessions. |
| Newsted's sandwiches | The documentary shows Newsted making sandwiches to take back to his hotel instead of ordering room service: "I got plans for those millions and it ain't for fucking sandwiches!" |
| The Grammy that got away | Enter Sandman was nominated for Best Rock Song at the 1992 Grammys and lost to Sting's "The Soul Cages". |
| Nine times platinum single | Enter Sandman has its own RIAA nine-times platinum certification for more than nine million US units. |
| A charity number one | In August 2021, a charity CD reissue for flood victims took Enter Sandman to number one in Germany. |
| The cougar and the snake | In 2019 a Canadian woman scared off a cougar by playing Don't Tread on Me on her phone, and Hetfield phoned her the following week. |
| Hetfield's guitars | He used ESP MX-220 and MX-250 Explorer-style guitars with EMG pickups. Gibson objected to the shape, and the model was later discontinued. |
Hear the Black Album on the Riffology Podcast
The Black Album was the subject of episode two of the Riffology podcast, RIFF002. You can hear the episode at the top of this page, and the Riffology podcast is available on all major platforms.
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