“Master of Puppets” by Metallica

I look back at the greatest thrash metal album of all time.

This album review celebrates 40 years of one of the greatest metal albums ever made.

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Genre: Metal, Thrash Metal

Label: Elektra

Release Date: March 3, 1986

Vibe: 💯

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

When it was released on March 3, 1986, 40 years ago this week, Master of Puppets wasn’t angling to become the widely accepted apotheosis of thrash metal. In the words of lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, Metallica were “just making another album,” one that would hopefully build off the momentum they’d generated after signing a splashy multi-album deal with Elektra in 1984. In short order, the label reissued Ride the Lightning to widespread acclaim, a move that helped the Bay Area outfit graduate from sweaty underground staple to a name big enough to play for 70,000 people at Castle Donington in the summer of 1985 (alongside Bon Jovi and Ratt, which is quite an era-specific lineup for you). But, even with those accomplishments under their belts, the initial rollout was quieter than you might think. There was no lead single, no music video ladeling chum into MTV’s waters, and a slim chance of making any sizable dent in the mainstream. It didn’t fit any of rock’s existing templates for global success, so it built its own.

What’s more remarkable than Master of Puppets’ initial wave of acclaim has been its staying power. Beginning in 1986, the LP enjoyed a 72-week run on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 29, and sold over 500,000 units in its first year of availability. Impressive, but nothing compared to its performance since SoundScan’s implementation, selling a hair under 8 million records from 1991 to 2023. As of February 2026, all versions of the album have accumulated over 3.8 billion streams on Spotify alone, amounting to a little over 2 million a day. I’m sure a Stranger Things needle drop didn’t hurt matters in that regard, but still, the numbers are eye-watering. It all adds up to a satisfying story about realizing one’s potential, but it undersells the more interesting aspect: they weren’t trying to find a bigger audience. They were building a more complex argument about what heavy music could do structurally, and doing so with unbridled confidence, a quality that would become increasingly misguided once they entered the 1990s.

A big part of the appeal of Master of Puppets is how it’s evolved into what many hardcore fans and casual listeners alike identify as peak Metallica. It’s structurally and melodically ambitious, building on the cosmic leap forward they took in those regards on Lightning, but still carries enough of the punk-inspired energy from 1983’s *Kill ‘Em All* to give it this palatable urgency. It was the last time the band would sound this crisp, this lean, this focused in their approach. By the time you get to 1988’s …And Justice For All, grief and alcholism had pushed them down a path where their music began to creak under the weight of their self-imposed largese. The songs here tackle weighty themes—most notably the consequences of warfare, abusive power structures, and oppressive political control—but they never come across as preachy or overwrought. Subtlety has never been Metallica’s strong suit, but none of the songwriting you hear here comes close to the grating grandstanding they’d become known for hitting you with, again and again, post-1991. The more I listen to Puppets, the more I pine for records like it that don’t jerk you around.

After starting the writing process together in the Bay Area, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich only invited Hammett and bassist, the late Cliff Burton, out to rehearsals once they’d already come up with ideas the pair thought were worth sharing. They would eventually decamp to Copenhagen following unsuccessful attempts to lay these tracks down in American studios (and, in a fun “what if” moment, briefly flirting with the idea of Rush’s Geddy Lee producing the LP). Once the sessions began in earnest, there wasn’t a ton of monkeying around with the demo versions of different songs. The majority of the instrumentals were recorded separately, with each member playing to a click track and guitar guide provided by Hetfield. What did change versus the Lightning sessions was the level of perfectionism. Both the band and producer Flemming Rasmussen, who was smack in the middle of a legendary run of his own, kept long hours, meticulously engineering every note for maximum impact.

You can still hear that attention to detail today. This tracklist, clocking in at nearly an hour, still screams out of your speakers or headphones with the intent of hitting you right in the gut. It creates those devastating payoffs in unexpected ways, too. There are misdirects and hairpin turns that, no matter how many times I’ve heard them, give you the chills. Take opener “Battery” for instance. It opens with this somewhat baroque acoustic guitar passage, one that’s just gentle enough to lull you into a false sense of security until it detonates the ground under your feet. This quiet-loud dynamic would later become a defining feature of early-90s alternative rock, executed with impressive precision and ferocity. It’s a technique that, like several others Metallica popularized during their 80s heyday, is taken for granted now and even considered cliched in some circles. Still, as a tone-setter that muscle and showmanship to spare, it’s difficult to top among thrash metal veterans.

Then, in an act of mesmerizing, you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yet swagger, comes the title track. All eight-and-a-half minutes of it. Its explosive opening and main thrash portion are as exhilarating a three or so minute stretch as anything Metallica’s recorded, before or since. But what I admire even more than those moments is the slow, more contemplative stretch in the middle, letting the listener simmer in the sonic fallout before the original theme returns with even more power than before. Lyrically, it’s about drug addiction and the mechanics of control, but the song functions as a structural blueprint for the whole album: tension established, tension complicated, tension resolved on its own terms. Not the audience’s, which is a critical distinction. At the time, Tipper Gore’s PMRC was busy parading through Congress with the “Filthy Fifteen,” a list that Metallica surprisingly never made. You’d think their refusal to pander to censors and replace their fiery attack with wobbling synthesizers would’ve made them bigger targets. Instead, the PMRC had to settle for Dee Snider.

That refusal to editorialize or moralize runs throughout Master of Puppets. “Disposable Heroes” grapples with military conscription from the perspective of a soldier being spent like currency. “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” arguably the album’s most accessible track, tells its story from inside the mind of a psychiatric patient who, as we come to understand, is far more conscious of what’s being done to him and why than anyone gives him credit for. It’s an architectural wonder, featuring an electric guitar that’s patient and melodic at first, building and building to a swirling, stunning climax. Later on, you get “Orion,” a nine-minute instrumental that takes its time in building tension, drawing more from classical music than its metal contemporaries. Burton had studied the greats in that regard and, during his time in Metallica, was known for a melodic vocabulary that was genuinely unusual in its brilliance. That “Orion” opens with this pastoral lead melody is proof enough that the band was in heat check mode during recording. Who even does that—or even contemplates doing that—at the time? There’s so much harmonic movement and tonal clarity that, strangely enough, it doesn’t call attention to or announce itself at every turn. It just unfolds naturally, rewarding repeated listens.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t spend a few more seconds on Burton, whose life was tragically cut short in September 1986, when the band’s tour bus skidded off a road in Sweden during the Damage Inc. tour in support of this album. He was 24. The band obviously went on to become a massive commercial draw, no doubt, but I don’t actually think they ever recovered from Burton’s passing. The inate chemistry he had with the rest of the group, not to mention the distinct creative sensibility he brought to the table, was forever lost in the years that followed. Fast-forward a few years and the bass (or lack thereof) on ...And Justice for All has been relitigated exhaustively ever since. Whatever the reasons, you can hear the space he left. “Orion” exists because he existed. The whole album sounds different knowing that.

But here’s the thing: it sounded that way before September 1986, too, so I don’t mean to flip this entire review into a posthumous framing. It’s just an incredible, indelible mark to leave on a genre’s legacy.

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PS: If you want to go deeper on the album’s compositional structure, the 2016 remaster is the version worth seeking out. The remaster gives the rhythm section and the low end in particular the room it always deserved.

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What’s your favorite Metallica song? Drop it in the comments.