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By Root 384 0

was actually provided by the striking of an anvil. ‘We put it on a backstairs when we recorded it. That was ridiculous, it weighed a ton. But [Lars] hit it with like a metal bar and it sounded really good. That was before samplers so we had to make our own sounds.’ The backstairs was also where they eventually placed Lars’ drum kit, ‘right on the other side of the door. There’s actually an apartment there now so somebody’s sitting in the living room watching the telly in the spot where Lars played the drums.’ Rasmussen says he knew the album was going to be special long before they’d finished it: ‘I was pretty sure at that time that they were gonna be really big. The funny thing was that everybody else in the studio came from a jazz background – they kept telling me, “But they can’t play!” And I went, “Fuck that! Listen to it, it’s brilliant!” I was really proud. I still am, actually.’ When it was over, “I was like, fuck, yeah, I wanna do more of this shit!”’

Of the eight tracks on Ride the Lightning – as they had decided to call the album after another of its centrepiece tracks – almost all would survive to become cornerstones of the long-term Metallica mythology: the only exception being the one track that seemed to offer a shred of light amidst the unrelenting gloom, a Thin Lizzy-esque mini-anthem in the making called ‘Escape’, its comparatively upbeat message – ‘Life is for my own, to live my own way’ – being the exception to the rule in the otherwise unremittingly bleak landscape of Hetfield’s lyrics. The rest of the album was unified by one theme: death. By mutually assured destruction (‘Fight Fire with Fire’); capital punishment (the title track); war (‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’); suicide (‘Fade to Black’); living death through cryogenics (‘Trapped Under Ice’); biblical prophecy (‘Creeping Death’); even an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired monster (‘The Call of Ktulu’). It was the sort of adolescent death trip any angst-ridden, acne-bedevilled teenage boy locked in his bedroom, railing impotently against an unjust world, might be expected to come up with. What set the album apart was the music. A discernible leap forward from their inspired but occasionally awkward, cheaply produced debut nine months before, Ride the Lightning was the first clear indication that there was more to Metallica than teen-speed and short-fuse power. Received at the time as the epitome of the emerging new thrash metal genre, listening back to it now it’s clear how much it owes not to any received notions of genre-defining but to the much more traditional values of melody, rhythm and old-school musical talent. The vocals remain one-dimensional but are no longer fey, due to Rasmussen’s good practice of double-tracking, adding plenty of oomph. The drums rely too much still on rolls and needless fills but there’s no mistaking the depth-charged beat, thanks again to the producer’s extra coaching and more experienced close-miking technique. The rest, though, could be Iron Maiden at its most fiery, from the wail of duelling guitars on the title track to the battering rhythms of ‘Creeping Death’. Most clearly, if not always directly, can be felt the influence of Cliff Burton. Uninterested in thrash metal, per se, his own playing stoked by jazz and classical references – his tastes ranging from the southern rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd to the mystical balladry of Kate Bush – Cliff’s sheer presence makes the band comfortable enough suddenly to explore such previously considered musical heresies as an acoustic ballad; songs that travel at something less than the speed of light; even a towering, Ennio Morricone-style instrumental.

Freed from the obligation of reproducing Dave Mustaine’s original work, Kirk Hammett’s guitars also come into their own, a universe apart from any notions of what a ‘thrash guitarist’ might be and much closer in aspect to the lessons he had been absorbing from that great Jimi Hendrix disciple, Joe Satriani. These were Kirk’s first attempts to break free of what he later described as the ‘one-voice guitar thing’ of 1980s thrash, and he recalled