Every band faces the challenge of pleasing their fans consistently. While artists may desire to take bold risks in the studio, there’s a limit to how far they can deviate from their comfort zone before losing audience support. Metallica, despite their iconic status, encountered criticism throughout their career, with drummer Lars Ulrich recalling early detractors dating back to their song ‘Fade to Black’.

When Metallica first started out, they were meant to be the antithesis of everything nice about heavy metal music. Since bands like Van Halen were making the genre sound like one big party, James Hetfield wasn’t making riffs that were meant to sound pleasant, often making songs designed to follow in the footsteps of metal legends like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.

Even though the band were on the cusp of a new genre known as thrash, they knew they would not get a deal when working in Los Angeles. Since most of the biggest names in town were copying the Van Halen model, like Ratt and Quiet Riot, Metallica would move up north before getting the call from Johnny Zazula from the other side of the country, asking them whether that would want to record their debut album in New York.

Since LA hadn’t treated them well at all, the band packed up and moved to New York to cut Kill Em All, losing original guitarist Dave Mustaine along the way. While the band would scrape together as much as possible for their debut, their second album was where they left their mark sonically.

From the first song, ‘Fight Fire With Fire’, Ride the Lightning was the kind of record that every metal fan had dreamed of…until they heard the fourth track. For the first time on a Metallica record, the song started off with an acoustic guitar, with Hetfield singing about feeling suicidal and hopeless to continue on with life. While the song would eventually pick up the tempo and become the band’s usual thrash song, Ulrich recalled their fans being absolutely pissed.

When speaking to Howard Stern decades later, Ulrich recalled just how much pushback they got from their core fanbase thinking that they were going in the wrong direction, saying, “On the second album, there was a song ‘Fade to Black’ that we play at almost every show, and James thought it would be a great idea to have acoustic guitars. So when the metal fans heard that there was a Metallica song with acoustic guitars, they lost their fucking lunches”.

Judging by what their fans had to say, Metallica took that criticism to heart…and proceeded to do it on every album. Throughout their classic period, every album would feature their brand of ballad-style songs, whether that was being trapped in a mental institution on ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ or telling the nightmarish story of being trapped within one’s own head on ‘One’.

Even though the band did eventually make more commercial fodder with albums like The Black Album or their Load period, there was never anything that they ever put out that wasn’t 100% what Metallica wanted to do. They could have sold out many times if they wanted to, but there was no chance that they were going to compromise their vision just to satisfy a small number of fans.