Metallica – Load

Metallica is a heavy metal band from San Francisco, formed in 1981 by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. The duo first met through an ad in a Los Angeles-based music newspaper. The band’s fast tempos, instrumentals and aggressive musicianship made them one of the founding “big four” bands of thrash metal, alongside Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer. Metallica ranks as one of the most commercially successful bands of all time, having sold over 125 million albums worldwide as of 2018, and are listed as one of the greatest artists of all time by magazines such as Rolling Stone. Load is their sixth album, released on June 1996. The album showed more of a hard rock side of Metallica than the band’s typical thrash metal style, featuring influences from genres such as Southern rock, blues rock, country rock and alternative rock. The cover of Load is an original artwork titled “Semen and Blood III” by Andres Serrano, created in 1990 by mingling bovine blood and his own semen between two sheets of plexiglas. Yikes.

2 x LP, 180 Gram, Gatefold
Label: Blackened Recordings
Cat. #: BLCKND011-1