What is the best-selling metal album of all time?

Metal has always been somewhat on the fringes of the norm when it comes to the charts. Sure, many people know names like Black Sabbath and might even be able to sing a couple of their riffs, but no one in their right mind was going to buy the latest surefire hit from them when they were putting together tunes for a party in the 1970s. The genre would take a long time before becoming a household name, but it had to go through a few awkward growth spurts first.

While the genre’s genesis started with bands like Sabbath and the heavy sections of Led Zeppelin’s material, things started to fracture slightly in the 1980s. Everyone could still respect the importance of a killer riff in the right context, but the true schism happened when the truly heavy bands went underground and the Sunset Strip became dominated by glittery rock and roll acts posing as heavy metal.

Although some genuine talent emerged from that scene at the time, heavy metal purists were always the ones blasting bands like Slayer and Metallica in their spare time. While the former clearly indicated everything that the genre stood for and what would most likely scare away everyone’s parents, the latter took the genre to new heights when they started making one hook after another in their prime.

Master of Puppets had enough power behind it, but with every song being nearly eight minutes, there was no way that they were going to get everything past the radio guidelines. All they needed was guidance to pair things down, and once Bob Rock was brought into the picture, the thrash legends had no idea how far they could take their music on 1991’s Black Album.

So, what is the best-selling metal album?

Compared to every other marathon listening session for albums like And Justice for All, The Black Album felt like the breeziest Metallica album despite it being their longest album up to that point. At 12 tracks, every single tune was tailor-made to get on the radio, taking the basis of their thrash sound and twisting it slightly to make it more accessible to the masses. Most people might not have stuck around for all eight minutes of ‘Disposable Heroes’, but no one was touching the dial whenever the hard groove of ‘Sad But True’.

And despite James Hetfield having concerns over going pop on ‘Nothing Else Matters’, their stately ballad is still one of the finest of their career. It was definitely a change of pace and metal fans may have been hurt, but what they were watching was history in the making when the album would not stop selling.

After extending their tours and rubbing elbows with other hard rock heavyweights like Guns N’ Roses, Metallica had graduated to become one of the biggest names in music, never mind metal. There were a lot of road miles put into their success by that point, but having everyone working their asses off on the record made for an entire body of work that barely had an ounce of fat on it, eventually finding its way onto the best-selling albums of all time.

There might be some long-forgotten contrarians claiming that Metallica sold out and it was never the same after The Black Album, but that doesn’t seem to matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Because at the end of the day, metal became a cultural force thanks to what they put together on this record, and now classic metal albums can be spoken of in the same breath as Dark Side of the Moon.

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