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how ‘when the other guys heard the solos on “Creeping Death” and “Ride the Lightning”, it was a different aspect of soloing than they were used to. Dave Mustaine played fast all the time. I play melodically. And I play parts, different sections that make the solo as hooky as possible.’ Although he admitted he had ‘always been very flashy’, the playing on Ride was full of restraint and controlled aggression. Where the excitement boils over, as on what he called ‘the whammy-bar craziness’ at the conclusion of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, it does so knowingly. This is not to say they had completely abandoned their commitment to being ‘the fastest and heaviest’: James’ clench-fisted rhythmic downstrokes are much in evidence throughout. But while there would be little room for levity on the album, from its doom-laden subject matter to the ominous front cover of an electric chair suspended amidst an electrical storm, as recording artists increasingly in control of their musical destiny Metallica were already starting to subvert that idea; to play against the grain and deliberately bend the rules. The typically windmilling opener ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ – one of the fastest numbers they would ever record – actually begins with a short acoustic ‘overture’, before fizzing like a stick of dynamite into explosive life. The album closer, ‘The Call of Ktulu’ (printed on some pressings, unforgivably, as ‘The Cat of Ktulu’), meanwhile, is an eight-minute-plus instrumental that takes its inspiration more from Morricone than it does Motörhead. A far more substantial showcase for Cliff Burton’s extravagant talents on the bass than its little brother ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’ on Kill ’Em All, it’s entirely symbolic of the massive strides Metallica had made as musicians since their hurriedly wrought debut. It’s also an impressively bold way of concluding what it was still hoped would be the album to bring them to a wider audience than the loyal but still limited following they had so far attracted.

The real signifier of Metallica’s determination not to be boxed in by the limitations of others’ expectations, though, was the inclusion of a seven-minute acoustic-based ballad: ‘Fade to Black’. As James later put it, ‘If we’d been told when we were recording Kill ’Em All that we were gonna record a ballad on the next record, I’d have said: “Fuck off.”’ Built upon a sequence of minor guitar chords picked as an arpeggio that James came up with while idling on an acoustic, its sombre, reflective mood a million miles from the juvenilia of anything he’d attempted as a songwriter before, the lyrics – although presented as a suicide note – were initially inspired by the theft of the band’s equipment that resulted in him losing his cherished Marshall. With the addition of Kirk’s tastefully applied electric crunch filling in for the lack of a chorus and Lars’ drums, for once, mirroring a similar restraint, ‘Fade to Black’ became at once the most harrowing and beautifully subtle piece of music Metallica had yet come up with.

Mostly, however, this was Metallica laying down a mission statement. In ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Creeping Death’ they had, simply, created two enduring heavy metal classics that would have sounded apposite whatever era of rock history they had sprung from. The former (misprinted on early pressings as ‘For Whom the Bells Toll’) might just as easily have come from early-Seventies Black Sabbath, Cliff’s expertly distorted bass solo which signals its beginning a marvellous, musicianly touch; the latter – destined to become a huge crowd favourite, chanting ‘Die! Die! Die’ – the first touchstone Metallica classic.

Not everybody was bowled over by such ‘originality’. Kirk’s former Exodus bandmate Gary Holt, for one, was distressed to discover, as he says now, that not only did the riff from an early Exodus number, ‘Impaler’, ‘become like one of the best riffs on Ride the Lightning, on “Trapped Under Ice”’, but that the now famous line in ‘Creeping Death’ which begins ‘Die by my hand…’ was taken from Holt’s own composition ‘Dying By