Kill 'Em All | Ride the Lightning | Master of Puppets | Metallica | Load and ReLoad | St. Anger
- Awesome Music: Even people who otherwise don't like these albums will admit that "Fuel" is a pretty kickass song. "Bleeding Me", "King Nothing", "The Outlaw Torn", and "The Memory Remains" aren't too far behind.
- Broken Base: To this day, Metallica fans are very divided in their opinions of these albums. Some like them for their experimentation and attempts by the band at straying from their comfort zone, while others dislike them for their alternative rock leaning and the band's change in image. There's also a third group of fans who feel the albums are okay, but have way too much filler and that Metallica should've simply combined the best songs from both into a single albumnote .
- Epic Riff: It's Metallica, so of course there are these. However, "The Outlaw Torn" definitely takes the cake!
- Heartwarming Moments: "Mama Said", especially when you consider that just eight years prior, the band wrote "Dyers Eve".
- Narm: There are some... odd... lyrical moments on the Load records.
- James's Verbal Tic of ending every sentence with "ah!" can be seen as this.
- "Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire!"
- "I do believe... I do believe... I do believe..."
- "Ooooooh, what I've knowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwn"
- "La-da-da-da. Da-da-da. La-da-da-da-da." While this was sung in a way to suggest loneliness and sadness, it sounds so out-of-place on "The Memory Remains" that it's hard to really take it seriously.
- Nausea Fuel: How the album covers were made. While they're meant to be artistic in nature, it's sickening to know that Load's album cover is a mixture of cow blood and the artist's own semen, and while ReLoad isn't as bad, cow blood and urine is still disgusting.
- Signature Song: "King Nothing", "Fuel", and "The Memory Remains" are the most consistently positively received songs off the duology, with the former two being the two songs with the most live plays off their respective albums.
- Tear Jerker:
- "Low Man's Lyric" is a very sad song about homelessness.
- "Mama Said" can be this for anybody who's had a strained relationship with their mother.
- On that note: "Until It Sleeps," given that it's about Hetfield's feelings of helplessness when his mother was dying of cancer.
- Even with Marianne Faithful's bizarre "la-da-da-da" lines (see Narm above), "The Memory Remains" is actually a pretty saddening song about celebrity irrelevance.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The initial reaction fans had to these albums was... savage, to say the least. Not just for the band's shift to a more bluesy alternative rock style of music but for their change in image. Cutting their hair, wearing eyeliner, and ditching the streetwear they were formerly known for in favor of some very odd fashions. The reputation of these two albums has improved significantly ever since, due to the number of new fans that got on board with the band through them (not to mention the comparably poor fan reaction to St. Anger and even poorer reaction to Lulu). But they still remain hotly contested to this day - albeit less for the change in image and more for the question of how successfully the band pulled off their new musical style.
