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“You can only be what the public thinks you are for so long before it becomes boring.”
 —Kirk Hammett

At some point in their twenty-seven years of making music, Metallica fell off their long-held throne as the ambassadors of heavy metal to the masses. No one disputes this, not even the band members themselves. Fans have asked, Why did this happen? How could they let it happen? Were they drunk on fame? Was our adulation simply too much pressure?

Most bands, of course, reach their zenith and flare out. Metallica, however, managed to survive their darkest period. Death Magnetic, their recently released ninth studio album, is their best work in over a decade, leaving listeners wondering why they finally stopped making bad music. But equally vital is the corresponding question of when the fall began. Some say …And Justice for All, their fourth album, which appeared in 1988, was their last good one. Others kept up their interest until the much-lambasted St. Anger assaulted eardrums around the world in 2003. Some go so far as to say that they sold out after Kill ’Em All, their 1983 debut. For my money, 1997’s ReLoad started their decline.

There are about as many answers to the question of when Metallica went south as there are factions within the Metallica fan base. In the eighties, metal bands went to the Bay Area and Tampa, Florida to get noticed, so in 1983, frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich moved the band from Los Angeles to the East Bay to join its burgeoning thrash metal scene. After releasing a few albums with two New York labels, Megaforce and Elektra, they picked up fans from all over the world—people like Eastern European anarchists; metalheads from Manchester, England; East Bay goths; L.A. suburbanites who remember the 1982 shows at seedy clubs; kids in Rochester and Indianapolis rebelling against their parents by cranking the title track of Master of Puppets; parents hoping to rediscover counterculture; and city kids who see the dark urbanity of the music reflected in their own surroundings.

Some thought they were selling out when they shortened their songs for Metallica (The Black Album)—by most accounts a minor masterpiece. Some thought they were going corporate when they cut their hair after recording Load in 1996 even though they played at Lollapalooza that summer. But that was before Radiohead and Girl Talk gave away albums for free. To clubgoing metalheads, anyone who sold music was selling out. Anyone who recorded at all went corporate. Metallica were just doing it better than most other metal bands, making music that old headbangers could love as much as punk kids and hipsters.

Still, no one agrees on how to relate them to the rest of metal or pop music at large. Since they made the jump from club act to recording artists, they have grown more and more isolated, one of those bands that draws a little from everyone but belongs with no one. Oddly monolithic as they are, both critics and fans loved them through at least the mid-nineties, and their albums still top the charts with seeming ease (Death Magnetic is their fifth consecutive number one debut in the U.S., more than any other band). Everyone agrees that they’re doing something right, but no one seems to know what.

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By its very sonic feel, metal as a genre tends to repel the uninitiated, methodically staking out new ground like a slowly expanding empire. This is especially true of thrash metal, a very traditional sect built around fast, repetitive guitar riffs and aggressive lyrics. Metallica, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, pioneered the genre in the eighties. But Metallica, the most commercially and critically successful of the four, always had to bear the cross of thrash’s popularity, an uncomfortable prospect in a fledgling sub-genre where underground status meant legitimacy. “I felt quite objectified by it all two or three years ago,” lead guitarist Kirk Hammett said of their fame in an interview with Rolling Stone. “When I met people, they’d go, ‘Wow, I always thought you were this big mean person. But you’re really very nice—and kinda short.’”

The bulk of American metalheads turned out to be suburbanites, people who were used to sold-out stadium concerts, not sweaty shows at city clubs. To the apostles of thrash it was astonishing that a song about the apocalypse (“The Four Horsemen” from Kill ’Em All) would appeal to kids who waited on the curb after live performances to be picked up by moms in minivans. But quiet apocalypse happens every day in the suburbs—picket fences and two-story houses have never been much good at hiding the rage and terror within. Metallica spoke to that dread with songs about private catastrophe and self-discovery, as solipsistic as emo punk but shot through with extra testosterone (a smattering of song titles: “Invisible Kid,” “Better than You,” “To Live Is to Die,” “Shoot Me Again,” “Broken, Beat & Scarred,” “Bleeding Me,” “Poor Twisted Me,” “My Apocalypse”). For all us suburban fans, Metallica were a way of tapping into pop culture, art, and the dark moody soul of adolescence all at once, our link to the popular and the avant-garde, a chasm that, to a posturing teenager, seems nearly unbridgeable.

Metallica’s first dictum is to explore relentlessly, and the avenues of exploration they chose, the new sounds they brought early on into the metal aesthetic, set them apart from their supposed musical peers. (Even their name suggests sonic miscegenation, starting with that hardest of genres but ending almost effeminately, suggesting, as it rolls off your tongue, a certain elision of manliness, or at least the restraining of metal’s tenebrous id.) Kill ’Em All is a classic thrash album in every sense—fast, noisy, loud—but on their follow-up effort Ride the Lightning, the band started expanding metal’s sonic canvas. The quieter, echoic guitar distortion and complicated song structures signaled, for some, a break with their previous work.

It wasn’t a break, of course. Hetfield and Ulrich saw it as simple evolution, the next step. (Subsequent albums by Slayer and Anthrax adopted some of this new sound.) But what did “The Call of Ktulu,” a nine-minute instrumental meditation on H.P. Lovecraft, have to do with the punk-inflected four-minute power tracks that everyone else was playing? Why did Hetfield and Hammett make their guitars sound like instruments in an orchestra instead of chainsaws ripping at trees? Didn’t they know that chainsaws were in?

The relentless experimentation hasn’t stopped. Aside from the uniform technical proficiency across their albums, each release has sounded more different from the last, every song trying to do what no other metal song has done before. The ambitious epic “One” from …And Justice for All borrows its subject—a physically disabled war veteran trapped inside his mind—from screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun, starting with sounds of helicopters and gunfire and building to an expansive, minor-keyed evocation of both the horrors of combat and the captive mind.

“One” epitomizes what Metallica are all about—epic struggle, self-reflection, and progressive experimentation. The lyrics sound like something you’d find off a death metal album—“Fed through the tube that sticks in me, / Just like a wartime novelty. / Tied to machines that make me be. / Cut this life off from me”—yet their clarity and specificity belie their darkness, inviting the listener into Johnny’s world. Midway through the song, the tempo changes abruptly, leading into an instrumental outro with a roaring Hammett solo and bass-heavy underscoring from Ulrich’s drums. (The mid-song switch is one of Metallica’s favorite and most imitated tricks.) We feel as we listen that we’re on a tour of the soldier’s psyche, the mid-song tempo change mirroring his sudden awareness of his mental imprisonment. One of their more richly evocative songs, “One” spawned Metallica’s first music video, won them their first Grammy for Best Metal Performance, and was Metallica’s first song to crack the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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Writing songs like this, though, necessitates a near-constant level of invention and reinvention. “The minute you stop exploring, then just sit down and fucking die,” Ulrich once said. This compulsion reached its apotheosis on their 1986 magnum opus Master of Puppets and 1991’s The Black Album, but later proved to be destabilizing. While 1996’s Load reoriented their sound away from noise and distortion, the next year ReLoad, comprised mostly of retooled leftover material from Load, took the urge to innovate a few steps too far. Sounding less like Metallica than like someone doing a parody of Metallica, ReLoad marks the turn into their dark period—a phase that culminated with St. Anger.

In a sense, everything that worked about Metallica nearly killed them. Their long, cerebral instrumental dirges eventually outgrew themselves, starting off searing and meticulously crafted (“Orion” from Master of Puppets) but even recently turning floppy and insipid (“Suicide & Redemption” from Death Magnetic). The compulsion to experiment led them to record an expensive, bloated double album with the San Francisco Symphony (S&M), and release two scatterbrained collections of old garage tunes and covers (Garage Days Re-Revisited and Garage Inc.). And if St. Anger—a raw, unpracticed return to their roots—sounds like an old car’s engine creaking along a freeway, Some Kind of Monster, a documentary about the making of St. Anger and the induction of bassist Robert Trujillo, is like the engine catching fire.

Death Magnetic, which was released in September, is the first album in over fifteen years to walk that fine line between innovation and traditionalism. Like their early recordings, the album has Metallica’s patent sonic depth, but Death Magnetic introduces a reduced quality to their sound, eschewing unnecessary affectations like intrusive violins and French horns. A proponent of minimalism in pop music, producer Rick Rubin pares away these extras to reinforce the band’s core sounds, making the album feel both lush and spare at once. Hammett’s guitar, which didn’t take a single solo on St. Anger, roars up and down its full register with just enough distortion, and Hetfield’s voice is the clearest it’s ever been.

Hetfield’s lyrics, too, have never been better. On “The Day that Never Comes” he deftly evokes a child’s claustrophobic fear of his abusive father: “Born to push you around / Better just stay down. / You pull away / He hits the flesh / You hit the ground.” And then, the creeping desire for revenge: “Push you cross that line… / Crawl in yourself / You’ll have your time.” The melody soars in the chorus, but in these verses a few spare guitar and bass notes let the words and Hetfield’s sensitive rendition take the foreground.

While the band lets loose on “All Nightmare Long,” a wonderfully exuberant thrash tune, they pull back a bit for “The Unforgiven III,” the only track where orchestral instruments make a brief (and welcome) cameo. Hetfield takes us on a journey, invoking the traditional metal trope of a hero’s epic voyage: “How could he know this new dawn’s light / Would change his life forever?” he asks as trombones and a string quartet fade from the melody. “Set sail to sea but pulled off course / By the light of golden treasure.” But even as we turn to the epic, the song gets personal: “Was he the one causing pain / With his careless dreaming? / Been afraid, always afraid, / Of the things he’s feeling.” Hetfield reaches back to Johnny’s mental imprisonment in “One,” but instead of the aggravation of disability, our hero feels emotion and consequence tingling at his fingertips.

As soon as he slumps into action (“He could just be gone… / He’ll just sail on”), indecision returns, this time vocalized in the chilling chorus by the hero himself: “How can I be lost, if I’ve got nowhere to go? / Search for seas of gold, how come it’s got so cold? / How can I be lost? In remembrance I relive. / And how can I blame you, when it’s me I can’t forgive?” The eeriness lingers with us, reflected in a single violin note. We feel as adrift as the hero, rocked by and forth by the undulating guitar.

Metallica were once as adrift as this hero, but when they focus and find the right guidance, their constant experimentation produces alluring, idiosyncratic music. “The Unforgiven III,” for instance, sounds like textbook metal—the reverberating guitar, the ample percussive backing—but in its ghostly evocation of a misty, inexorable voyage, it sounds different from any thrash song ever to treat that common theme.

When Metallica write a song or record an album that collapses under its own weight, they make sure to own up to their shortfalls. Appropriately, the last lines of “The Unforgiven III” sound like an apology, a plea for forgiveness. “How can I be lost? In remembrance I relive. / So how can I blame you, when it’s me I can’t forgive?” But underneath this, there lies a wry grin, the knowledge that if the song fails and we try to silence them, they will only wait and ask us to listen again.

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I was a listener in high school. Growing up in the Bay Area, I thought of Metallica as my hometown band. Sure, they weren’t as storied as Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, but it was our music. We would hum their songs on our way to class and ask everyone if they knew when the new album was coming out. When we were sophomores, Hetfield entered rehab, and it was all anyone talked about for weeks. They weren’t our heroes; they were like the stars—an unshakable constellation that, every four or five years, handed down a new sacred text for us to study and memorize. That they were human was an odd, quaint notion, so when the band sued Napster back in seventh grade, it felt strange that they would deign to care about the music we liked.

Listening to Death Magnetic makes me wish, for the first time, that I could be in high school again, that I could reconnect with that person I used to be. I remember walking to my car on drizzly days, driving down to In-N-Out and the movies with my brother, then over to someone’s house or back home again, playing “Enter Sandman” and “Master of Puppets” on repeat. Those were the days when a good mix CD was a work of art, before music blogs and Rapidshare, when music, to us, was transmissible but still precious. I miss that now, even though I know nostalgia is merely shorthand for the deception of memory. But on drizzly days even now, there are times when I think it would be nice to be deceived, if only for a song or two.