Then again, it would always be hard to make something new and fresh-sounding after The Black Album. The group had quickly turned into the biggest name in metal music, but since many fans rejected the album outright for being too pop-inclined compared to their earlier records, it was time for them to switch things up once again.

If fans had a problem with ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Nothing Else Matters’, though, Load was enough to make most people throw up immediately with ‘Until It Sleeps’. This was the version of Metallica that wanted to pander to the alternative crowd, and while the songs were still hard rock, they weren’t endearing themselves to the fans that had been exposed to them, along with acts like Slayer back in the day.

What they lacked in musical heaviness, they more than made up for in lyrical heaviness. Throughout both albums, Hetfield had a lot to get off his chest following his ascent to the top, including the problems that he had back home and the toll that alcohol was taking on his lifestyle.

For a band that was given the pet name ‘Alcoholica’ for half their career, it was almost expected that they drink. There didn’t seem to be a problem, but ‘The House That Jack Built’ was already the calm before the storm. Hetfield was starting to see his alcohol problems slowly eating away at him, and when listening to ‘Bleeding Me’, he let himself go to a place that the older Hetfield would have probably preferred to keep hidden.

Even though the track is as long as their epics like ‘One’ and ‘Master of Puppets’, it’s not meant to be those kinds of heavy-hitting experiences. The first half sees Hetfield strumming away very sombrely as he talks about digging towards something much better. Once things shift halfway through the song, Hetfield singing about being bled dry and being caught under the wheels of a car is a perfect way of summing up both the pressure that was on him and the toll he took on his physical health.

Though certain members of the band initially resisted including it on the record, Hetfield insisted on keeping it the way it was to feel creatively satisfied. While the unreleased song ‘Temptation’ was a good companion piece to this, it not getting released may have been for the best.

Since Hetfield would briefly leave Metallica to go to rehab, a lot of what turned up on St Anger represents the dark future that ‘Bleeding Me’ had hinted at, only this time with riffs that are borderline unlistenable and lyrics that show all of his internal scars. Compared to every other Metallica release, this album was by far the weakest songwriting-wise, but listening to it, it feels like an exercise to just let out all of the aggression of the past few years of their lives.

And while St Anger does put a little bit of shine on the Load era for not being quite as unlistenable, ‘Bleeding Me’ is an important piece of Metallica history if only for what it represents. Whereas St Anger was a man pleading with himself to get better, this was someone still in the throes of addiction, realising that his demons might catch up with him.