The first four Metallica albums are among the genre’s most powerful and enduring documents, and while the band’s debut LP, Kill ‘Em All, was a landmark for thrash metal, Ride the Lightning presented a quantum leap in terms of songwriting and structure.
Kill ‘Em All leaned heavily on elements of boogie beats nabbed from ’70s Judas Priest and the heavy swung feel to fast-paced riffs that Dave Mustaine would eventually take with him to Megadeth, but Ride the Lightning, released July 27th, 1984, almost wholly struck the swung-boogie vibe from its mostly slower-paced riffs, focusing instead on a near neo-classical sense of grandeur plucked more from the pages of groups like Rush, Rainbow, Blue Öyster Cult, and even Priest’s more grandiloquent epics than bands like Sweet or even the more rock ‘n’ roll end of hardcore punk, a genre whom the members of the band were vocal fans.
This change would be inexplicable if not for Kill ‘Em All songs like “Four Horsemen,” “No Remorse,” and “Phantom Lord,” more programmatic tunes that sought to echo the epics-in-miniature of NWOBHM bands like Diamond Head and more obscure groups like Savage. Ride the Lightning tunes like “Fight Fire With Fire” and “Fade to Black” can be seen as evolutions of this stylistic dalliance, elaborating on the sense of atmospherics that were present in those earlier songs compared to the relatively straight-ahead thrashing heavy metal fare of songs like “Whiplash” and “Jump in the Fire.” This shift became the foundational element of almost every track of Ride the Lightning (save for band-hated track “Escape” — more on that one later).
This shift on Ride the Lightning would prove to dominate Metallica’s future songwriting as well, expanding the band’s use of inventive guitar harmonies, prog rock-inspired structures and chord voicings while dialing back overall speed in order to increase the intricacy and well-roundedness of transitional riffs and fills. These stylistic elements that the group committed to on Ride the Lightning became the foundation for their sound for that early golden period, being honed on Master of Puppets before being exploded out to its maximum on …And Justice For All.
Many argue that Lightning‘s follow-up, Master of Puppets, is the greatest heavy metal album of all time, and thereby the best Metallica album, as well. And while this may very well be true, it is arguably not the most important Metallica album. Master of Puppets may have been a perfection of the forms Metallica conceived in those early years, marrying the psychopathic aggression of the more outré forms of hardcore punk with the grandiloquence and sophistication of progressive rock all within the hard-driving brutal carapace of NWOBHM — and Motörhead-inspired heavy metal, but those forms first erupted on Ride the Lightning.
There is always a power and an allure to those eruptive moments in history, be it a band’s history or a group’s history. It’s precisely why despite both Paranoid and Master of Reality being better records, Black Sabbath’s debut album still holds greater mystique in the greater tale of heavy metal mythology. In Metallica’s case, while Kill ‘Em All was the band’s first album on paper, it also represented the last in a line of demo recordings that marked the early Mustaine years, in a way making it more a finale than a beginning. It is on Ride the Lightning that the Metallica everyone truly loves, the Metallica that conquered the world and birthed a million varied forms of heavy metal from the perfected crystalline forms of those first four albums, was born.
