Metallica's 2003 album St. Anger is celebrating 20 years of people making snare drum jokes this June, but that's not all! Rolling Stone has ranked St. Anger at No. 43 on their 50 Genuinely Horrible Albums By Brilliant Artists list and… I mean, I don't think it really deserves it.
Yes, the production of St. Anger sucks. We know. Rolling Stone cites "songs are unfocused and seemingly unfinished" and "straight-from-rehab lyrics" that could've been better written alongside production issues on their list, but does that really warrant it being No. 43 on a list of 50 across every genre? St. Anger is a bloated record (75 minutes is a long time) that was trying way too hard to deliberately be hard rock and take turn away from Metallica's past, which isn't surprising given everything the group was going through at the time. It's not great for sure, but St. Anger feels a little over-hated.
Rolling Stone's reasoning for the No. 43 ranking is as follows:
"When Metallica were at their absolute low point as a band thanks to James Hetfield's chronic alcoholism, the defection of bassist Jason Newsted, and uncertainty about where they stood in a post-Napster music universe, they brought in a camera crew to chronicle the making of their LP St. Anger. This led to the stellar documentary Some Kind of Monster, and a deeply disappointing album.
"Fans rightly fixate on the decision to mic Lars Ulrich's snare drum so it sounds like he’s banging on a tin can throughout the entire album, but there are deeper issues with St. Anger. The songs are unfocused and seemingly unfinished, and the straight-from-rehab lyrics ('I want my anger to be healthy') could have used more thought. The band gets very defensive whenever fans or journalists raise these issues, but their set lists tell a different story. They've played fewer St. Anger songs in concert than any of their other albums."
And if you're really hung up on the snare drum thing, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich explained it in a 2020 interview with NME. Basically it was an impulsive choice that Ulrich and Hetfield liked and kept, because really – aren't artists making music for themselves first and foremost?
"I hear St. Anger. That's a pummelling and a half, and there's a lot of incredible, raw energy, and it's, like, 'Woah!'
"It's been slapped around a little bit. But the snare thing, it was like a super-impulsive, momentary… We were working on a riff. Hetfield was playing a riff in the control room. And I ran up. I was, like, 'I need to put a beat behind that.' I ran into the tracking room and sat down and played a couple of beats over this riff to not lose the energy of the moment, and I forgot to turn the snare on.
"And then we were listening back to it, and I was, like, 'Wow! That sound kind of fits that riff, and it sounds weirdly odd and kind of cool.' And then I just kind of left the snare off for the rest of the sessions, more or less. And then it was, like, 'Yeah, that's cool. That's different. That'll fuck some people up. That sounds like that's part of the pummeling,' or whatever.
"And then it becomes this huge, debated thing. And sometimes we'll kind of sit on the sidelines and go, like, 'Holy shit! We didn't see that one coming,' in terms of the issue that it turns into."
