Lars Ulrich was asked by Rolling Stone to compile a list of his 15 favorite metal and hard rock albums, as part of their quest to list the 100 greatest metal albums of all time.
Lars said of compiling his list:
"For each artist that's part of my ultimate metal or hard-rock albums, I went for what you would call the definitive moment in their catalogue," he explains. "And for a lot of these bands, they went through a kind of evolution, a kind of a growth and a lot of them have a lot of great records. So what I picked is a combination of what that album represents from the artist and what impact it had on me."
Lars listed his albums in alphabetic order, rather than ranking them, offering in-depth descriptions in the Rolling Stone article.:
AC/DC – Let There Be Rock
Alice In Chains – Dirt
Black Sabbath – Sabotage
Blue Öyster Cult – On Your Feet or On Your Knees
Deep Purple – Made In Japan
Diamond Head – Lightning To The Nations
Guns N’ Roses – Appetitie For Destruction
Iron Maiden – The Number Of The Beast
Judas Priest – Unleashed In The East
Mercyful Fate – Melissa
Motörhead – Overkill
Rage Against The Machine – The Battle Of Los Angeles
System Of A Down – Toxicity
UFO – Strangers In The Night
Warrior Soul – The Space Age Playboys
The only big "surprise" to me is listing System of A Down's classic Toxicity, and Rage Against the Machine, whereas the rest, I kind of expected based on previous interviews Lars gave. The Metallica drummer will go in-depth with each of these albums on this week's episode of his Apple Music Beats 1 radio show "It's Electric."
In related news, Lars was asked what inspires Metallica to keep making records by 97.9 The Loop, and had a pretty great answered:
"Being out on the road is obviously beyond incredible, but playing five or six new songs that we do every night and having new material, that's really cool," he continued. "We do a lot of meet-and-greets and meet all different kinds of folks.
"I've gotta tell you: Three or four days ago in Texas, there was a kid in one of the meet-and-greets; he couldn't have been more than six or eight," Lars said. "And I said, 'Blah blah blah. How're you doing? What's your favorite song?', expecting him to say 'Enter Sandman' or whatever. And he goes 'Atlas, Rise!' I'm not making that up. Six or seven year sold. I said, 'What's your favorite METALLICA song?' He didn't skip a beat — [he] just [said], 'Atlas, Rise!' So that's the reason we make records still. That's amazing — that that still happens."
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