St. Anger

So your bassist quit, your fans are getting more and more pissed off about your Napster-inspired legal actions, and your last album was pretty much DOA—what’s an aging pack of speed-metal maniacs to do? Well, if you’re Metallica, you hole up and proceed to churn out the heaviest, most unrepentantly aggro album of your career (and, yes, kiddies, we’re including Kill ’Em All). Clocking in at over 70 mother-chunkin’ minutes with nary a guitar solo to be found (what, did Kirk Hammett quit, too?), this blistering disc might as well be called Garage Days Re-Re-Revisited. From the galloping double-bass blastoff of “Frantic” to James Hetfield’s final frenzied exclamation in “All Within My Hands” (the subtlety-be-damned “Kill! Kill! Kill!”), St. Anger more than lives up to its title. With its disappointingly muddy production (courtesy of Bob Rock, who also pulled bass duty) and unrelenting thrash attack, the album probably won’t grab much radio play, but that’s OK—this thing’s gonna be huge on the Internet.