For reasons unbeknownst to even myself, I decided to rank every original Metallica song from their nine studio albums. All cover songs [including the old and the new Garage Days] were excluded. Sure, some songs like “Breadfan” would have ranked pretty damn high, but part of the criteria was songwriting, which you can’t really evaluate if it’s not a Metallica song. The two original songs from the S&M album are included.
As with everything like this, it’s completely subjective, biased, and in most people’s opinion, wrong. But it’s my list, and it will ultimately accomplish the task of entertaining you for 45 seconds of web browsing, which is why you’re here in the first place.
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What I thought was interesting, relatively speaking, is that by ranking every song you can then qualitatively rank the albums. To do this, I took the sum total of rankings of an album’s songs and divided it by the number of songs on the album to determine an ‘album average rank’. Much like golf and lifetime STD totals, the lower number the better. To make it easier to visualize in graph form, I subtracted each album’s figure from 97 to invert the scores so higher is better. The results aren’t shocking, but the Black Album does worse than you would think.
First, the album scores, then the list….
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| 1 | Master of Puppets | MP |
| 2 | Creeping Death | RL |
| 3 | One | AJ |
| 4 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | RL |
| 5 | Seek and Destroy | KA |
| 6 | Damage, Inc. | MP |
| 7 | …And Justice For All | AJ |
| 8 | The Unforgiven | BK |
| 9 | The Shortest Straw | AJ |
| 10 | Orion | MP |
| 11 | Enter Sandman | BK |
| 12 | Battery | MP |
| 13 | Harvester of Sorrow | AJ |
| 14 | Blackened | AJ |
| 15 | The Four Horsemen | KA |
| 16 | The Unnamed Feeling | SA |
| 17 | Sad But True | BK |
| 18 | The God That Failed | BK |
| 19 | My Friend of Misery | BK |
| 20 | Bleeding Me | LO |
| 21 | Hero of the Day | LO |
| 22 | No Leaf Clover | SM |
| 23 | All Nightmare Long | DM |
| 24 | Fuel | RE |
| 25 | St. Anger | SA |
| 26 | Welcome Home (Sanitarium) | MP |
| 27 | Some Kind of Monster | SA |
| 28 | The Thing That Should Not Be | MP |
| 29 | The Outlaw Torn | LO |
| 30 | Eye of the Beholder | AJ |
| 31 | The Frayed Ends of Sanity | AJ |
| 32 | Fade to Black | RL |
| 33 | Disposable Heroes | MP |
| 34 | Leper Messiah | MP |
| 35 | Hit the Lights | KA |
| 36 | The Day That Never Comes | DM |
| 37 | Motorbreath | KA |
| 38 | Wherever I May Roam | BK |
| 39 | The Memory Remains | RE |
| 40 | Low Man’s Lyric | RE |
| 41 | Ride the Lightning | RL |
| 42 | Fight Fire with Fire | RL |
| 43 | Jump in the Fire | KA |
| 44 | (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth | KA |
| 45 | Whiplash | KA |
| 46 | Until It Sleeps | LO |
| 47 | King Nothing | LO |
| 48 | Through the Never | BK |
| 49 | Shoot Me Again | SA |
| 50 | Frantic | SA |
| 51 | All Within My Hands | SA |
| 52 | The End of the Line | DM |
| 53 | That Was Just Your Life | DM |
| 54 | The Judas Kiss | DM |
| 55 | Cyanide | DM |
| 56 | Broken, Beat and Scarred | DM |
| 57 | -Human | SM |
| 58 | Holier Than Thou | BK |
| 59 | Don’t Tread on Me | BK |
| 60 | The Call of Ktulu | RL |
| 61 | Purify | SA |
| 62 | Sweet Amber | SA |
| 63 | Where the Wild Things Are | RE |
| 64 | No Remorse | KA |
| 65 | Metal Militia | KA |
| 66 | Dirty Window | SA |
| 67 | Fixxxer | RE |
| 68 | Ain’t My Bitch | LO |
| 69 | Poor Twisted Me | LO |
| 70 | Mama Said | LO |
| 71 | Suicide and Redemption | DM |
| 72 | My Apocalypse | DM |
| 73 | To Live Is to Die | AJ |
| 74 | Dyers Eve | AJ |
| 75 | Nothing Else Matters | BK |
| 76 | Of Wolf and Man | BK |
| 77 | The Struggle Within | BK |
| 78 | Devil’s Dance | RE |
| 79 | Carpe Diem Baby | RE |
| 80 | Bad Seed | RE |
| 81 | Slither | RE |
| 82 | The Unforgiven 2 | RE |
| 83 | 2×4 | LO |
| 84 | The House Jack Built | LO |
| 85 | Cure | LO |
| 86 | Wasting My Hate | LO |
| 87 | The Unforgiven 3 | DM |
| 88 | Better Than You | RE |
| 89 | Ronnie | LO |
| 90 | Prince Charming | RE |
| 91 | Trapped Under Ice | RL |
| 92 | Invisible Kid | SA |
| 93 | My World | SA |
| 94 | Phantom Lord | KA |
| 95 | Attitude | RE |
| 96 | Thorn Within | LO |
| 97 | Escape | RL |