Master of Puppets Review

The tempos were already there on Ride the Lightning. What arrives here is structure. Battery opens on layered acoustic guitars for a minute and a half before it turns into the fastest thing on the record, and the contrast is planned rather than stumbled into. The title track runs eight and a half minutes and earns them: a riff that keeps stepping down a semitone, a clean middle section with a harmonised lead over it, then a return that lands harder because you have been away.

Orion is an instrumental built around Cliff Burton's bass carrying the melody through the middle, which no other band at this level was letting a bass player do. Welcome Home (Sanitarium) slows to a crawl and works anyway.

Rasmussen's production is the other reason it lasted. It is dry, close and enormous, the kick drum is a wooden thud rather than a click, and the bass is audible throughout, something the band famously threw away on the next record.

Hetfield's writing is the soft spot and it is worth saying so. Addiction, a televangelist, an officer sending men to die: real targets, drawn in thick crayon, with Leper Messiah in particular saying nothing a placard could not. Nobody plays this album for the words. It became thrash's first platinum record, went eight times platinum, entered the National Recording Registry in 2015, and Burton was dead by September of that year.