Metallica made Master of Puppets without a hit single, without a music video, and without cutting a syllable of its eight-and-a-half-minute title track. The band booked four months at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, turned down the chance to record in Los Angeles, refused to record any music videos, and chose to open for Ozzy Osbourne instead of chasing radio play. Eight million American copies later, the song they refused to edit for the airwaves is the one Netflix dropped into Stranger Things in 2022 to power a teenage exorcism.
This is the album where thrash metal stopped being the genre that mainstream rock journalism could safely ignore. Rolling Stone, which had spent the early 1980s pretending Metallica did not exist, called it "the sound of global paranoia". The Library of Congress eventually called it the first heavy metal recording worth preserving for the United States. And Robert Trujillo, the bassist who would join the band seventeen years later, still calls it the album that has "a lot of everything". The story of how four sober Danes-by-residence in their early twenties made it, and how they very nearly did not survive touring it, is the story of how heavy metal grew up.
Master of Puppets Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Metallica |
| Album | Master of Puppets |
| Release Date | 3 March 1986 |
| Label | Elektra (US), Music for Nations (UK), Vertigo (Europe) |
| Producer(s) | Flemming Rasmussen and Metallica |
| Studio(s) | Sweet Silence Studios, Copenhagen (recording, 1 Sep to 27 Dec 1985); mixing finished by Michael Wagener in January 1986 |
| Genre / Subgenre | Thrash metal, with progressive and classical inflections |
| Track Count | 8 |
| Total Runtime | 54:52 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | #29 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | #41 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | #4 Germany, #5 Finland, #10 Austria, #14 Sweden (2004), #17 Switzerland, #28 Canada |
| Certifications | 8x Platinum US (2025), 6x Platinum Canada, 3x Platinum Australia, Platinum UK, Germany, Finland, Italy, Poland, Argentina, New Zealand |
| Estimated Sales | 8 million in the US alone; SoundScan logged 7,980,000 between 1991 and 2023 |
| Key Singles | "Master of Puppets" (French commercial single, 2 July 1986); "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" issued as a promo |
Cultural Context
1986 was the year thrash stopped being a tape-trading subculture and started selling actual records. Metallica's third album landed in March. Slayer's Reign in Blood followed in October; Megadeth's Peace Sells. But Who's Buying? in September. Anthrax's Among the Living arrived early the next year. The "Big Four" tag did not yet exist as branding, but the four bands that would carry it had each released what would become their canonical statement inside a fourteen-month window.
That window opened up against a hard rock mainstream that looked nothing like it. Bon Jovi released Slippery When Wet in August. Cinderella's Night Songs shipped in the same month. Van Halen, then in its first year with Sammy Hagar, was the biggest North American rock act in the world. Metal that wore make-up, used hairspray and made videos for MTV was running the genre. Metal that did none of those things was supposed to stay in the basement.
What Metallica had behind them, walking into Sweet Silence Studios in September 1985, was a mid-decade context that included:
- The post-PMRC parental-advisory panic, which Metallica mocked with a facetious warning sticker on the back of the cover
- An MTV stranglehold on rock promotion that the band publicly refused to play along with
- A nascent Big Four about to consolidate the American thrash scene
- A British metal press, Kerrang! foremost, that had championed the band since Kill 'Em All and would put Master of Puppets on its cover
- A US rock-radio format that played nothing longer than four minutes and nothing heavier than Ratt
The decision to make an album whose shortest track ran over five minutes and whose centrepiece passed eight, with no plan to edit either down, was not an oversight. It was the entire pitch.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Metallica had been a major-label band for sixteen months when they began work on Master of Puppets. Michael Alago at Elektra Records had heard Ride the Lightning in the autumn of 1984, signed the band to an eight-album deal, and reissued the second album in November of that year. Between then and the start of the Copenhagen sessions, the band parted ways with manager Jon Zazula and signed with Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch at Q Prime, the heavyweight management firm that also looked after Def Leppard and AC/DC. Burnstein had been at PolyGram when he first noticed Metallica T-shirts in a London record shop. The story he tells about that moment is the one Q Prime has been telling for forty years.
"When I saw two kids who worked there in London wearing T-shirts of a local San Francisco band, I knew I was onto something. When I heard their record, I knew they were the one band that could sell to both mainstream and underground metal audiences."
Cliff Burnstein, Q Prime, quoted in Spin, August 1986
The band spent the summer of 1985 on the road. They played the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in August in front of seventy thousand people, sharing the bill with Bon Jovi and Ratt. They went home with the swagger of a band that had outlived its own underground origins and the bookkeeping of one whose second album had already shipped enough copies in the US to make the label want a third on a tight timetable.
What they did not have was a hit single. Ride the Lightning had given them "Fade to Black", a song that had begun to do for them what "Stairway to Heaven" had done for Led Zeppelin: pull in listeners who would not have given anything else on the record a chance. The pressure going into the next album was to do that again without sounding as if they were doing it again, and to do it without filing down any of the edges that had made the first two records dangerous.
Pre-production and Demos
Writing began in mid-1985 in a garage in El Cerrito, California, the rented house that local fans nicknamed the Metallica Mansion. Hetfield and Ulrich were the primary writers, building songs the way they had always built songs: a riff arrives, gets assembled and reassembled until it starts to sound like a piece, gets a title, and only then does Hetfield write the lyric to match the title. Kirk Hammett joined for solos and harmony parts; Cliff Burton joined to argue for the bits that pulled the band away from straight thrash, the arrangements and harmonised middle sections that would end up giving Master of Puppets its scale.
Six of the eight songs were complete before the band left for Denmark. The two that were not, "Orion" and "The Thing That Should Not Be", were finished in the studio. Hetfield improvised the chromatic main riff of "Battery" while relaxing in London on the way over. Working titles for the album itself are not well documented; once the title track existed, the album took its name. What was documented is that this is the first Metallica album with no songwriting contribution from Dave Mustaine. Mustaine maintained for years that he had co-written "Leper Messiah", lifting from an old song called "The Hills Ran Red"; the band denied this but admitted that one section incorporated Mustaine's ideas. The credits stood.
Before recording started, both Ulrich and Hammett went looking for outside help to raise their own playing. Ulrich took drum lessons to tighten his timing and double-kick technique. Hammett went back to his old teacher Joe Satriani, not to learn solos but to learn how to record more efficiently. That detail matters: this was a band preparing for an album that they intended to be technically harder than anything they had attempted, and they did not assume their existing chops were going to be enough.
Creating the Album
Lars Ulrich had been in talks with Geddy Lee to produce the record. The Rush bassist's prog-leaning ear, his work on Power Windows that same year, and his willingness to take on the project would have radically changed what Master of Puppets sounded like. Schedules collapsed the conversation before it produced anything binding. Metallica went back to Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, the producer and the room that had given them Ride the Lightning. They began recording on 1 September 1985 and finished on 27 December, just under four months in a single studio.
Rasmussen's recollection is that the band turned up with their demos in such finished shape that only small structural changes were made in the room. The sessions ran long because the band had developed a perfectionism they had not had access to before. They could afford it. They had a label budget. They had a producer they trusted. They had decided to stop drinking on recording days, which, given the touring nickname they had earned by then, was the single biggest internal change the album required.
"We were just making another album. We had no idea that the record would have such a range of influence that it went on to have. The band was definitely peaking at the time. The album has the sound of a band really gelling, really learning how to work well together."
Kirk Hammett, quoted in Classic Rock, 2012
The mechanics were old-fashioned. Songs were started with a click track and a guide guitar from Hetfield; the rest of the band layered in afterwards, instruments largely tracked separately rather than as live takes. Hammett ran a 1974 Gibson Flying V, a Jackson Randy Rhoads and a Fernandes Stratocaster copy. Hetfield played a Jackson King V through a Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC+ modified for use as a pre-amp, the rhythm-guitar sound that would define the band for the next decade. Burton played his Aria Pro II SB1000 through Mesa heads and cabinets. Ulrich tracked on his own Tama kit but borrowed a Ludwig Black Beauty snare from Def Leppard, who were stalled at the time on the protracted Hysteria sessions and not using it.
By Christmas the band had run out of studio time and run out of energy. The multitrack tapes were boxed up and flown to Michael Wagener in January 1986. Wagener finished the mix in Los Angeles; George Marino mastered. Total time from first session to finished lacquer was just over four months. Total recording budget has been variously reported around $30,000, modest even for 1985 and a fraction of what Mutt Lange was burning on Hysteria in the next studio bill over.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals, rhythm guitar | James Hetfield | Also acoustic guitars on "Battery", first solo on "Master of Puppets", second solo on "Orion" |
| Drums, percussion | Lars Ulrich | Borrowed a Ludwig Black Beauty snare from Def Leppard for the sessions |
| Bass, backing vocals | Cliff Burton | Arranged the middle section of "Orion"; classical training shaped the album's harmonic scope |
| Lead guitar | Kirk Hammett | Worked with Joe Satriani before sessions to improve recording technique |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, engineer | Flemming Rasmussen | Returning from Ride the Lightning; Sweet Silence Studios, Copenhagen |
| Producer | Metallica | Co-production credit |
| Assistant engineer | Andy Wroblewski | Sweet Silence house staff |
| Mixing | Michael Wagener | Took over in January 1986 in Los Angeles after Copenhagen sessions overran |
| Assistant mixing | Mark Wilzcak | Wagener's assistant on the mix |
| Mastering | George Marino | Original 1986 master and the 1995 remaster |
| 2017 remastering | Howie Weinberg, Gentry Studer | For the 2017 expanded edition |
| Artwork and photography | ||
| Cover concept | Metallica, Peter Mensch | Built from a Hetfield sketch of crosses and puppet hands |
| Cover illustration | Don Brautigam | American illustrator, also responsible for sleeves for AC/DC and Anthrax |
| Inner sleeve photos | Ross Halfin | The Kerrang! house photographer who had documented the band since 1984 |
| Back cover photos | Rich Likong, Ross Halfin, Rob Ellis | Three-way credit on the rear sleeve |
| Disputed / uncredited | ||
| Songwriting (Leper Messiah) | Dave Mustaine | Long-standing Mustaine claim that "Leper Messiah" lifted from his old song "The Hills Ran Red"; band denied it but acknowledged one section used a Mustaine idea. Credits stood as Hetfield and Ulrich. |
| Producer (planned) | Geddy Lee | Ulrich was in talks for Lee to produce; never materialised due to schedules |
The Songs
Eight tracks. Hetfield wrote every lyric. Three songs run over eight minutes, four sit between five and seven, one is an instrumental. The sequencing follows the same shape as Ride the Lightning: an up-tempo opener with an acoustic intro, a lengthy title track, a ballad-shaped fourth song, an instrumental late in the running order. The shape is identical; the execution is denser, longer and a great deal heavier.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Battery | Hetfield, Ulrich | 5:13 | Opens with multitracked acoustic guitars; main riff improvised by Hetfield in London | |
| 2 | Master of Puppets | Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton, Hammett | 8:36 | Yes (France, 2 Jul 1986) | The cocaine-as-narrator lyric; quotes a riff from Bowie's "Andy Warhol" at 6:19 |
| 3 | The Thing That Should Not Be | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 6:37 | Down-tuned Cthulhu Mythos epic; the heaviest track on the record | |
| 4 | Welcome Home (Sanitarium) | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 6:28 | Promo | Based on Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; the album's "Fade to Black" |
| 5 | Disposable Heroes | Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett | 8:17 | Anti-war lyric at 220 bpm in sections; Hammett's solo phrasing imitates war-film scores | |
| 6 | Leper Messiah | Hetfield, Ulrich | 5:40 | Lyric on televangelism; title borrowed from Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" | |
| 7 | Orion | Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton | 8:28 | Instrumental; Burton arranged the middle section and the harmonised bass and guitar lines | |
| 8 | Damage, Inc. | Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton, Hammett | 5:33 | Opens with reversed bass chords based on Bach's "Komm, susser Tod" |
"Battery" opens with a stacked sequence of nylon-string classical guitars that build to a wall of distortion before the song proper begins. The riff that emerges is one of the fastest things Metallica had written: heavily distorted minor dyads where you would expect root-fifth power chords, played with the off-beat accenting that became the Metallica fingerprint. The lyric is about violence as a battery in the legal sense, "assault and battery", although some critics have always preferred to read the title as the military meaning, an artillery battery. The truth is probably both at once.
"Master of Puppets" is the song the album is named after and the song that, forty years later, is the band's most-played live track. Mick Wall has read the whole album as governed by the same idea: "the invisible forces of control that govern all our lives". The narrator of the title song is cocaine. The fast chromatic downpicking sits around 212 beats per minute. The middle section, the famous clean arpeggiated interlude with a Hetfield solo before Hammett's distorted lead, drops in a riff quote from David Bowie's "Andy Warhol" at the 6:19 mark, a Burton-and-Hammett homage to a writer they both loved. The song closes on a fade-out of sinister laughter.
"The Thing That Should Not Be" is the album's pure horror track. The lyric draws directly on H.P. Lovecraft, specifically The Shadow over Innsmouth and the Cthulhu Mythos; the chorus calls the entity by name. The main riff, down-tuned and slow, is designed to evoke something dragging itself out of the sea, and the song's debt to Master of Reality-era Black Sabbath is loud enough that the band have never bothered to deny it.
"Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" is the album's "Fade to Black", a song that opens with clean single-string and harmonics in alternating 4/4 and 6/4 time, hands the verses to somber arpeggios and the choruses to distortion, and ends in a hard finale. Hetfield's lyric is built on Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, told from the point of view of a patient unjustly committed. It is the moment on the album where the band proves, again, that they can write a song that the people who hated the rest of the record will find a way to hum.
"Disposable Heroes" opens side two with the album's anti-war song. The narrator is a young soldier whose fate is controlled by his superiors; sections of the song run at 220 beats per minute, making it one of the most physically demanding tracks Metallica had attempted. Hammett built the closing guitar phrase around the sort of melodic figure he kept hearing in war-film scores. Robert Trujillo, two decades later, named it his favourite Metallica song.
"I feel Master of Puppets has a lot of everything. It's got instrumentals, it's got great segues, great riffs. It's got one of my favorite songs ever by Metallica, and that song is 'Disposable Heroes'. Any time I can hear that particular song, count me in. 'Battery' is an amazing song. So it's just got everything that I love about Metallica."
Robert Trujillo, interviewed by Blabbermouth, 9 May 2023
"Leper Messiah" takes its title from a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" and its target from the 1980s televangelism boom. The verses run at a mid-tempo 136 bpm before a galloping 184-bpm middle section that climaxes in a distorted, screamed "Lie!". It is the song Dave Mustaine maintained for years had been built on his old "The Hills Ran Red"; the band conceded that one section incorporated a Mustaine idea, but the writing credit stayed with Hetfield and Ulrich.
"Orion" is the Cliff Burton centrepiece, an eight-minute instrumental built around a heavily processed bass intro that sounds like an orchestra fading in. Burton arranged the middle section, including the harmonised bass and guitar lines that lift the song clear of anything Metallica had recorded before. It would not be played live in full until the band performed the album from start to finish at the Escape from the Studio festival in 2006, twenty years after release. It is still the least-performed song from the record. It was played at Burton's funeral.
"Damage, Inc." opens with a series of reversed bass chords based on the chorale prelude of Bach's "Komm, susser Tod, komm selge Ruh", a chord change Burton brought in from a piece he had been playing for years. The song proper then drops into a fast pedal-point riff in E that Hammett has credited to Deep Purple. It is the album's most violent closer and one of the few tracks where Hetfield uses the word that earned the band their tongue-in-cheek parental-advisory sticker.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Unlike the singles-era British bands that gave fans a wholly new song on the flip of every release, Metallica did not record extra studio material for Master of Puppets. The eight tracks that made the album are the entire studio output of the Copenhagen sessions. The "Master of Puppets" 7-inch single that came out in France in July 1986 carried a live track on the B-side rather than a new song.
What did exist, and what eventually surfaced in 2017 on the deluxe box, is a substantial archive of rehearsal tapes, demo recordings, rough mixes, outtakes and interview material from the period:
- Garage demos cut at the El Cerrito house in mid-1985
- Rough mixes from the Copenhagen sessions before Wagener took over the final mix
- Interview reels covering the writing process and the band's reaction to playback
- A fan-recorded cassette of the 26 September 1986 show at the Solnahallen in Stockholm, Burton's final performance
- Live recordings from the 1986 and 1987 tour legs, including material with both Burton and Newsted on bass
The Stockholm cassette is the document with the most weight. It was bootlegged for decades and then officially released as part of the 2017 box, the last full performance Burton ever gave with the band, in passable mono audio with crowd shouts intact.
Album Artwork and Packaging
The cover concept was a Hetfield sketch. He drew a war cemetery, rows of identical white crosses, with strings running up from each cross to a pair of hands hovering in a red sky. The image was the album's thesis in a single picture: people, soldiers, addicts, congregations, controlled by an unseen master. The sketch went to Metallica's new management at Q Prime, where Peter Mensch worked it into a brief and passed it to Don Brautigam, an American illustrator who had already produced sleeves for AC/DC and Anthrax.
Brautigam stayed extremely close to the Hetfield drawing. The puppet hands in the finished painting still have the slightly childlike proportions Hetfield had given them, missing fingernail detail and all. Brautigam slipped his initials, "D.B.", into the grass at the bottom of the canvas as a quiet signature. Ross Halfin shot the inner-sleeve band photos. The back-cover photography was credited jointly to Halfin, Rich Likong and Rob Ellis.
The back cover carried the band's own parody of the PMRC's then-new parental-advisory regime. In place of a real warning sticker, the sleeve read: "The only track you probably won't want to play is 'Damage, Inc.' due to multiple use of the infamous F word. Otherwise, there aren't any 'shits', 'fucks', 'pisses', 'cunts', 'motherfuckers', or 'cocksuckers' anywhere on this record." It was the only joke on a sleeve that otherwise told the listener exactly what kind of album this was.
The original Brautigam painting eventually went to auction at Rockefeller Plaza in October 2008 and sold for $28,000.
Release and Reception
The album was released on 3 March 1986 by Elektra in the United States, Music for Nations in the United Kingdom and Vertigo across much of continental Europe. It entered the Billboard 200 on 29 March at number 128 and climbed steadily across the spring and summer, peaking at number 29 in 1986 and staying on the chart for seventy-two weeks. Billboard reported that the first three weeks alone sold 300,000 copies in the United States, with no radio play and no music video to support it. By the time it passed half a million US copies later that year it had become the first thrash metal album to be certified gold by the RIAA, a milestone Cliff Burton did not live to see.
Internationally the album reached number 4 in West Germany, the top five in Finland, the top twenty in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and number 41 in the UK Albums Chart. The reissue cycle would do better: in 2004 the album hit number 14 in Sweden, in 2008 it pushed back into the Australian and Norwegian top forty. By 2025 the RIAA had certified the album 8x Platinum, eight million US copies, with the SoundScan-era total (since 1991) standing at 7,980,000 alone.
Critical reception split clean down the line of where the writer was based. Kerrang! gave it the maximum five-K rating and used the phrase that the band's management would quote for the next decade.
"Master of Puppets finally puts Metallica into the big leagues where they belong."
Kerrang!, March 1986
In the United States, Tim Holmes at Rolling Stone wrote one of the magazine's first serious thrash-metal reviews, arguing that Metallica had redefined heavy metal with the technical skill and subtlety on display, and describing the record as "the sound of global paranoia". Spin, that month's other major American outlet, was less sure: Judge I-Rankin' praised the production but felt the band had traded the rawness of Kill 'Em All for a more "intellectual" direction. Robert Christgau, writing for the eventual 1990 collection of his 1980s reviews, gave it a B- and noted that for all the band's political bent the music still evoked "revolutionary heroes" who were "male chauvinists too inexperienced to know better".
Retrospective verdicts have been less divided. AllMusic later gave the album a five-star review and called it the band's best. Pitchfork awarded the 2017 expanded edition a perfect 10/10. Classic Rock reviewed the same reissue five stars; Metacritic's aggregate score landed at 95. Rolling Stone moved the album from number 167 to number 97 across successive updates of its "500 Greatest Albums" list and placed it at number 2 on its 2017 "100 Greatest Metal Albums" list, behind only Black Sabbath's Paranoid. Rock Hard in Germany ranked it second only to AC/DC's Back in Black across all genres. IGN simply called it the best metal album of all time.
Singles and Music Videos
Metallica's deliberate refusal to release a music video for any song from Master of Puppets is now part of the band's mythology. It was the position they held for a further two years; the first Metallica music video would be the 1988 promo for "One", on the next album. In 1986 they simply did not do videos. They reasoned, correctly, that touring would do the same job better.
| Single | Release | Territory | B-side | Chart action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Master of Puppets" | 2 July 1986 | France (commercial), other markets (promo) | Live recording | Reached the lower reaches of the UK Singles Chart on import; no Billboard Hot 100 entry |
| "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" | 1986 | Promotional only, various territories | Rock-radio airplay only, no commercial release |
That was the entire singles campaign. No pre-release single. No lead-off track sent to radio before the album dropped. No music video for either of the two tracks that did get a single release. By the standards of an Elektra rock release in 1986 it was almost negligent. The result, as everyone now knows, is that the album outsold most of the records that were promoted properly.
Touring and Live
The Damage, Inc. Tour began in March 1986. From March through August Metallica opened for Ozzy Osbourne across American arenas, the band's first sustained run in venues that size. The pairing was inspired and slightly fraught. Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett would routinely soundcheck with Black Sabbath riffs, which Osbourne sometimes read as gentle mockery; Ulrich's line, later, was that the band was honoured to be on the tour and Osbourne treated them well. The setlist was nine songs long, four of them from Master of Puppets: "Battery" as the opener, the title track, "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" and "Damage, Inc.".
On 26 July 1986, before a show in Evansville, Indiana, Hetfield broke his wrist in a skateboarding accident. The band cancelled that night's show and Ozzy played a longer set. For the rest of the Ozzy run and into the early dates of the headline European leg, Hetfield sang from the front of the stage with his right arm in a cast while John Marshall, the band's guitar technician (and later guitarist with Metal Church) stood at the back and played his rhythm parts. Hetfield got his guitar back in late September. The band, predictably, banned him from skateboarding on tour from that point on; he broke his wrist on a skateboard again in 1992 anyway.
"In the B-markets, people really don't know what we're all about. But after 45 or 50 minutes we can tell we've won them over. And fans who come to hear Ozzy go home liking Metallica."
Lars Ulrich, quoted in Chuck Eddy, Rock and Roll Always Forgets
The European leg opened in September with Anthrax as direct support. Just after dawn on 27 September 1986, the band's tour bus left the road on European route 4 outside Dorarp in southern Sweden. The bus rolled onto its side. Cliff Burton, asleep in the bunk he had won from Hammett on a draw of cards earlier that night (the ace of spades, the story goes), was thrown through a window and the bus landed on him. He was killed instantly. The driver claimed black ice; band members on the scene disputed it. The driver was charged with manslaughter and acquitted. Burton was twenty-four.
The remaining European dates were cancelled. The band flew home to San Francisco. Within five weeks they had auditioned a long list of bassists in Los Angeles and chosen Jason Newsted, then with Phoenix-based thrash band Flotsam and Jetsam. Newsted was already a serious Metallica fan and knew the new album front to back. The band were back on stage by the middle of November 1986 and played a short Japan run, then resumed US dates in early 1987 to fulfil the deferred Damage, Inc. commitments. The full tour ran across more than 140 shows by the time it closed in February 1987.
In TV, Film and Media
For most of the album's first three decades, Master of Puppets showed up in films and games where the music director needed shorthand for either a metalhead character or impending chaos. "Battery" landed in Project X (2012) and Hesher (2011), the latter with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a metalhead character built around the band's catalogue. "Disposable Heroes" turned up in an episode of Colony in 2018; a 2007 acoustic version Metallica recorded for the Bridge School Benefit was released on the 25th-anniversary Bridge School compilation in 2011. Both "Battery" and the title track were in Guitar Hero: Metallica in 2009. "The Thing That Should Not Be" appeared in Rock Band 2.
Then, in July 2022, the season-four finale of Netflix's Stranger Things placed the title track at the centre of a long set-piece scene: the character Eddie Munson, played by Joseph Quinn, performs "Master of Puppets" on guitar in the Upside Down dimension to distract a horde of demonic bats. The scene aired on 1 July. By the end of the same week the song had entered the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, spent a fortnight inside the global Spotify top thirty (sitting behind Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill", which had been resurrected by the same series), and pushed the parent album back into the Billboard 200. Metallica's official channels posted a video of the band jamming "Master of Puppets" via Cameo with Quinn himself.
The retroactive music video Metallica eventually filmed for the title track, released decades after the original 1986 release, is the closest thing to a "Master of Puppets" promo clip that exists. The actual promotion in 1986 was the absence of one.
Controversy, Censorship and Lawsuits
Compared to its 1986 thrash peers, Master of Puppets attracted relatively little censorship. The album escaped the PMRC's parental-advisory regime in part because the band beat them to the punch with the joke sticker on the rear sleeve. "Damage, Inc." carries the only profanity on the record. No country banned the album outright. No territory issued an alternate cover.
The closest thing to a legal dispute over the album is the long-running Dave Mustaine claim on "Leper Messiah", the assertion that the song lifted material from his pre-Metallica song "The Hills Ran Red". The band denied the claim in print, acknowledged that one section incorporated a Mustaine idea, and let the credits stand. No lawsuit was filed.
The tour-bus crash that killed Cliff Burton resulted in a manslaughter charge against the bus driver, who was acquitted. James Hetfield went on record at the time arguing the driver had been drunk; an investigation ascribed the crash to black ice. The band have never publicly accepted that conclusion.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
The most significant single tribute to the album is Master of Puppets: Remastered, a covers compilation that Kerrang! released as a free giveaway with its 8 April 2006 issue, marking the album's twentieth anniversary. The tracklist read like a roll-call of the bands who had grown up on the original: Machine Head took "Battery", Bullet for My Valentine handled "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", Trivium covered "Master of Puppets" itself, Mastodon took "Orion", Chimaira tackled "Disposable Heroes", and Scottish thrashers Mendeed closed the disc with "Damage, Inc.".
Beyond the Kerrang! disc, full-album covers and tribute records have repeatedly used the album's imagery and arrangements. Acoustic tribute albums, bluegrass-Metallica projects (Iron Horse most prominently), eight-bit chiptune covers of the title track and a continuous run of cover-band YouTube uploads have kept the songs in the live-amateur ecosystem since well before YouTube's algorithm rewarded them.
Going the other way, the songs themselves are full of small homages and quoted passages. The Bowie "Andy Warhol" riff appears at 6:19 in "Master of Puppets". The reversed bass intro of "Damage, Inc." is built on Bach's "Komm, susser Tod" chorale. The clean-guitar voicings of "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" sit on a chord sequence that listeners with an ear for Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here-era playing have always heard a shadow of. None of these are samples in the technical sense. They are the seams in the songwriting where Burton's classical-listening habits and Hammett's Bowie-and-Hendrix shelf show through.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
The album has been in print continuously since 1986. The major editions to know are:
- 1986 original Elektra LP/CD, eight tracks, 54:52, George Marino mastering
- 1995 Elektra remaster, also mastered by George Marino, the version that ran through the CD-buying boom years
- 2006 Kerrang! 20th anniversary giveaway covers disc, packaged with the magazine
- 2014 Sanctuary 180g audiophile vinyl reissue
- 2017 Blackened Recordings expanded box set: remastered by Howie Weinberg and Gentry Studer, with three LPs (including a Chicago 1986 live recording), ten CDs of interviews, rough mixes, demos, outtakes and live tapes, a cassette of the 26 September 1986 Stockholm show (Burton's final performance), two DVDs of 1986 interview and live footage, and an extensive booklet
- 2017 standalone remaster on vinyl and CD, the deluxe set's audio on its own
- Periodic Blackened Recordings vinyl repressings since, the basis of the bulk of current new-copy sales
In 2023 Metallica acquired a majority stake in Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, Virginia, the plant that had been pressing Blackened's vinyl for years. The acquisition was widely read as the band moving from "approving" their vinyl to controlling the manufacturing pipeline that puts their catalogue on shelves. The deadwax engravings on recent pressings of the catalogue have been part of the same posture: "Vinyl Up Your Ass!" on Kill 'Em All and Ride the Lightning, "Obey Your Re-Master!" on Master of Puppets, "And Vinyl For All!" on ...And Justice for All, "You Just Stood There Pressing Vinyl" on the self-titled, "Hardwired to Make Our Own Vinyl" on Hardwired, "33 RPM or Nothing!" on 72 Seasons. Whether the runout gags became a mission statement or the mission statement became a runout gag depends on which end of Furnace you are standing at.
Legacy and Influence
The clearest single measure of the album's status is the Library of Congress decision in 2015 to add it to the National Recording Registry, the federal preservation list. Master of Puppets was the first heavy metal album the registry had ever selected. The criteria are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"; Metallica's third album was the federal answer to all three.
Critical lists have largely arrived at the same verdict. Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" placed it at number 167 in 2003, number 167 again in 2012 and number 97 in 2020. The same magazine's 2017 "100 Greatest Metal Albums" list put it at number 2, behind Black Sabbath's Paranoid. Time's 100-best-albums list included it. IGN called it the best heavy metal album of all time. Martin Popoff ranked it the same. Guitar World's readers ranked the main riff of the title track at number 7 on its top-20 riffs list.
The album's structural innovations, the long-form songwriting, the orchestral arrangements, the willingness to put an eight-minute instrumental at the back end of the running order, became the template for the prog-thrash and progressive-metal scenes that followed. Dream Theater's Images and Words, the wave of late-1990s technical metal that would eventually produce Mastodon and Opeth, the 2000s metalcore bands who structured their breakdown-led epics on a similar logic of dynamic build and release: all of them were operating in a vocabulary that Master of Puppets had made commercially viable.
For Metallica themselves, the album was the close of the first phase. ...And Justice for All followed in 1988 with Jason Newsted on bass, the first record to feature Hetfield's wrist-back, full-time rhythm guitar without a stand-in, and the first to have a music video. The self-titled "Black" album arrived in 1991 and made them the biggest band on earth. The 1990s and the Lou-Reed-and-St-Anger sideways turns into the early 2000s are a different story. The Metallica that walked into Sweet Silence Studios in September 1985 is the Metallica that walked out of it in late December, and that band ended on the Swedish E4 highway in September 1986. The album they made in those four months is the document of what they were.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The producer who almost was | Lars Ulrich was in active talks with Rush's Geddy Lee to produce the album. The collaboration died on calendar conflicts; Lee was deep in Rush's own Power Windows cycle that year. |
| The borrowed snare | Ulrich tracked the album on a Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum he borrowed from Def Leppard, who were stalled in the protracted Hysteria sessions and not using it. |
| The first metal album in the US National Recording Registry | In 2015 the Library of Congress added Master of Puppets to the National Recording Registry, the federal preservation list. It was the first heavy metal album the registry had ever selected. |
| $28,000 for the original cover painting | Don Brautigam's original oil-on-board painting of the cemetery scene was auctioned at Rockefeller Plaza in New York in October 2008 and sold for $28,000. |
| The Bowie quote at 6:19 | The middle section of the title track quotes a riff from David Bowie's "Andy Warhol", placed there by Burton and Hammett as a homage to a shared favourite. |
| The Bach intro | "Damage, Inc." opens with a series of reversed bass chords built on Bach's chorale prelude "Komm, susser Tod, komm selge Ruh", a piece Burton had been playing for years. |
| The Lovecraft chorus | "The Thing That Should Not Be" lifts directly from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth and the broader Cthulhu Mythos; the chorus literally names the entity. |
| The PMRC joke | The back cover carries a band-written parody of the new parental-advisory regime, listing every word that does not appear on the record. "Damage, Inc." is flagged as the only track with profanity worth worrying about. |
| The skateboard rule | James Hetfield broke his wrist skateboarding before a show in Evansville, Indiana on 26 July 1986. Tech John Marshall played his rhythm parts on stage for the next two months. Hetfield was banned from skateboarding on tour. He broke his wrist on a skateboard again in 1992 anyway. |
| Burton's last show | Cliff Burton's final performance was on 26 September 1986 at the Solnahallen in Stockholm. A fan-recorded cassette of the show is included in the 2017 deluxe box. |
| The ace of spades | Burton and Hammett drew cards to decide who got the preferred bunk in the tour bus the night before the crash. Burton won with the ace of spades. The bus rolled within hours. |
| Mustaine and "Leper Messiah" | Dave Mustaine maintained for years that "Leper Messiah" incorporated material from his pre-Metallica song "The Hills Ran Red". The band conceded that one section used a Mustaine idea but kept the songwriting credits unchanged. |
| Furnace Record Pressing | In 2023 Metallica acquired a majority stake in Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, Virginia, giving the band genuine control over how their vinyl is manufactured. The deadwax message on current Master of Puppets pressings reads "Obey Your Re-Master!". |
The Riffology Podcast
The Riffology podcast goes deeper into Master of Puppets, Cliff Burton's last months with Metallica, the Damage, Inc. Tour and everything else this article only had space to introduce. We talk through the songs, the sessions, the road, the loss and the legacy, and we'd love to hear your own memories of the album in our community. The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and every other major platform, and the player is at the top of this page.
