By the mid-1990s, Metallica didn’t really need to answer to anyone. For all of the people who were calling them sell-outs for daring to dream of bigger things on The Black Album, the fact that it did so well and is still regarded as one of the greatest metal albums of all time meant the thrash Titans had their cake and ate it in front of everyone. But every band must change at some point, and James Hetfield said that half of the stuff they made during Load was far from perfect.
At the same time, what would you do if you were Metallica in this situation? They had already conquered the world as metal warlords with ‘Enter Sandman’, but how would they shoehorn themselves into the new school when metal was exiting the conversation with the grunge movement?
Metal bands were going through a dark period, but they weren’t wiped from the face of the Earth. Veterans like Van Halen were still doing alright, and groups like Alice in Chains were bringing an alternative edge back into metal music, so it wasn’t like doing an alternative metal project was impossible.
The only problem was no one knew which direction to go in. Hetfield loved what he heard from grittier metal bands like Corrosion of Conformity, while Lars Ulrich felt that the group could take a few cues from what Oasis and U2 were doing. As hilarious as it would have been to hear Metallica try their hand at making a mash-up of their version of ‘One’ with U2’s song of the same name, they decided to split the difference right down the middle.
What resulted was a Southern-fried, half-baked album that left fans absolutely cold. If the hardcore metalheads didn’t think they were sell-outs then, they certainly were now, and for the first time, it seemed like Hetfield actually agreed.
When interviewed for Playboy in the 2000s, Hetfield admitted that he didn’t think that their last albums made any sense at all, saying, “I really don’t like looking at it now… It was U2, or Stone Temple Pilots, or some band relying on an image. What the fuck did we need that for? That was just stupid. Jason [Newsted] and I were really not into it—Kirk and Lars were gung ho. You either laugh about it, or you get wound up. I’m doing both, actually.”
Even when interviewed in the documentary Some Kind of Monster, Hetfield wasn’t willing to let it go. Since most of the time was spent airing out their grievances, the frontman admitted that both Load and ReLoad were prime examples of them whipping mediocre songs into decent shape.
Then again, Hetfield might be selling the album a bit short. Is it over-bloated? Absolutely, but some songs are among the greatest in their catalogue. Compared to the confessional side of St Anger, which felt more than a little uncomfortable, this is the open side of Hetfield that fans never get to see, including him talking about struggling with alcoholism on ‘Bleeding Me’ and ‘The House That Jack Built’.
And when you look at all of the butt-rock bands that came afterwards, a lot of them ended up sounding a lot like this. Load and ReLoad may be merely decent Metallica records, but if you were to make an argument as to why they should be hated, bringing subpar biker rock acts to the top of the charts is a good place to start.
