Master of Puppets by Metallica

Master of Puppets, Metallica's third album, came out on Elektra on March 3, 1986, and it's thrash metal with its armor polished and its sights raised. They made it at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen with Flemming Rasmussen, co-producing it themselves, and it's the last record Cliff Burton played on: the bassist died on September 27, 1986, when the band's tour bus crashed in Dörarp, Sweden, during the tour for this album.

James Hetfield barks and chugs on guitar and vocals, Kirk Hammett's leads scream and slice, Burton's bass rumbles and sings, and Lars Ulrich drives the drums like a runaway freight train. "Battery" is a full-on stampede, the title track is a monster of speed and switchbacks, "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" broods and then boils over, "Disposable Heroes" is a brutal, relentless charge and "The Thing That Should Not Be" crawls in slow and sludgy. Critics praised the music and its political lyrics. Instead of a single or a video, the band hit the road for a five-month American tour opening for Ozzy Osbourne; the European leg was scrapped after Burton's death.

Few metal albums are held in higher esteem or cast a longer shadow, and it's the record credited with pulling the American thrash scene together. It has gone eight times platinum in the US, and in 2015 it became the first metal recording picked by the Library of Congress for the National Recording Registry. Even the cover, a cemetery of white crosses on strings pulled by a pair of hands under a blood-red sky, painted by Don Brautigam, has become part of metal lore.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.