Ride the Lightning | Master of Puppets |...And Justice for All | Metallica | Load and ReLoad | St. Anger | Metallica: Through the Never
- Creator Backlash: While the band does consider St. Anger a necessary album as a means of getting through all the toxicity and negativity they'd built up, they don't reference it very much on good terms, and almost none of it is ever played live these days.
- Creator Breakdown: It's been well-documented that this album was effectively a group therapy session for the band — after spending the last few years between intra-band hostility, rehab, and outside politics, the band sought out to make a "raw", deliberately unpolished and crashing-sounding album as a release of all of their negative emotions. Most the lyrics on the album were written by Hetfield after getting sober, which reflects on the themes of him wanting to be free from his personal demons, from addiction to his anger problems.
- Creator Killer: Almost. St. Anger is known as "the album that nearly tore Metallica apart", as Hetfield considered disbandment during its troubled production. Sure, Metallica can still sell out stadiums anywhere in the world, but largely as a legacy act. What St. Anger killed was the band's mainstream relevance, and they're now mostly seen as the metal version of "dad rock."
- Cut Song: "Temptation". The only reason we even know it exists is because a one-minute excerpt of it can be heard in the Some Kind of Monster documentary.
- Follow the Leader: Nu Metal was the biggest rock genre in 2001-2003, with Metallica clearly basing St. Anger on bands like Limp Bizkit and Slipknot.
- Rarely Performed Song: Given the Creator Breakdown going on at the time of its production and its status as a near-Creator Killer, the band almost never plays anything from the album these days.
- Troubled Production: So much that it has an entire documentary about it. As a short recap, after the tepid-to-lukewarm reception to Load and ReLoad and waning popularity come the late-90's, the band decided to get back to recording again in 2000, only for everyone to implode: Jason Newsted quit the band after years of hazing and resentment, James Hetfield went to rehab for a year and began clashing with bandmates over his newfound sobriety, and everyone was on incredibly tense, antagonistic terms, with production personnel constantly being on the fritz, such as producer Bob Rock needing to fill in for bass before Robert Trujillo was hired. Hetfield has admitted that the more questionable and unpolished creative decisions made on the album were rooted in a desire for catharsis that they as a band needed to sort out if they were to stay together.
