Latest news with #BlackAlbum
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Legendary Hard Rock Band Racks Up the Heavy Metal as Iconic Album Hits Sales of 20 Million
Metallica is one of the biggest hard-rock acts in history. They're currently slaying fans on tour and their classic records continue to shift units, as two of their classic titles just reached new certification heights by the Recording Industry Assn. of America. The band has announced through their press representatives that their self-titled 1991 album, known as The Black Album, has been certified 20 times platinum for sales in excess of 20 million copies. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 That's big enough news, but in typical Metallica style, there's more. Masters of Puppets, the band's third album, has been certified eight times platinum for over 8 million in sales. The Black Album is seen as Metallica's mainstream breakthrough as it went to No. 1 in 10 different countries, including the U.S., where it spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200 beginning the chart week of Aug. 31, 1991. 'We had come off the …And Justice for All album and tour. For me, it was pretty obvious that we had taken the progressive, complicated side of Metallica as far as we could take it,' drummer, who writes the bulk of the band's songs with singer/guitarist , said in an interview for The Billboard Book of Number One Albums. 'The songs kept getting longer and more and more sideways. When we took those songs out on the road, we realized that was it. We really needed to make a major change — not so much for commercial reasons, but creatively we had exhausted that route.'During that same period, Ulrich had begun to rediscover his hard-rock roots by listening to classic sides by the Rolling Stones and AC/DC. 'The one thing in Metallica that we had not done was to really sit down and try to write a bunch of short and more to-the-point songs,' he said. 'We decided to take what we do in Metallica and make it a little more straightforward and not be so concerned about trying to show our musicianship.' The plan worked. The first song that Ulrich and Hetfield wrote for the new album was 'Enter Sandman,' which Ulrich said, 'That was the most straightforward, simplest song we had ever written. We did that in two days. That kind of set the tone for the whole record.' With producer Bob Rock, known for such classics as Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, on board, Metallica went on to write and record such classics as 'The Unforgiven,' 'Wherever I May Roam,' 'Nothing Else Matters' and more. 'Everyone has one album when everything comes together,' said Ulrich. 'This was ours.' Metallica is currently on the third year of its M72 World Tour, which has set attendance records at venues ranging from SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles to the JMA Wireless Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. The band's next gig is Wednesday, May 28 at Northwest Stadium in Washington, D.C. Legendary Hard Rock Band Racks Up the Heavy Metal as Iconic Album Hits Sales of 20 Million first appeared on Parade on May 28, 2025
Forbes
28-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Metallica Become The First Metal Band To Hit Double Diamond
(MANDATORY CREDIT Midori Tsukagoshi/) Metallica photo session in a dressing ... More room during live in Berlin, Berlin, November 5, 1992. (Photo by Midori Tsukagoshi/) Standing as the most popular metal band in the world, it doesn't come as much of a surprise to see that Metallica's Black Album is now RIAA certified double diamond, i.e. 20 times platinum. This news comes straight from the RIAA awards social media page, which also notes that Metallica's magnum opus Master of Puppets has now gone eight times platinum as well. Metallica saw their biggest mainstream breakthrough with their 1991 self-titled LP (aka The Black Album) earning the band their first No.1 charting album. To date it's their highest selling album, and the first metal album to reach double diamond, which of course makes The Black Album the most popular metal record of all time. It's safe to say that much of the band's mainstream appeal is a direct result of The Black Album. Sure, just about every metal fan will say that any of the band's previous four albums are superior, and while they might be true, none of those album would have seen the multi-decade success they've had if it wasn't for The Black Album breaking Metallica through to millions of new fans. Metallica now holds the accolade for becoming the first metal band to have a record go double diamond, but there are handful of other hard-rock albums that have managed to reach the same feat. AC/DC's 1980 opus Back In Black is certified 27 times platinum, and Guns N' Roses' 1987 debut Appetite For Destruction, is triple diamond (30 times platinum). The only other metal record to come close to Metallica's double diamond certification is Black Sabbath's 1970 sophomore LP, Paranoid, which currently sits at 12 million sales worldwide. It's hard to say whether or not there will ever be another metal band that's as successful or as popular as Metallica. Of course, the sky is the limit as to what's possible, but the ceiling that Metallica continue to raise make it seem less than likely another metal act will surpass or even match their feats in the next few decades. Hopefully these proves to be wrong and some other band soon reinvents the wheel just as Metallica did in 1991.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Metallica's ‘Enter Sandman' at Sold-Out Virginia Tech Concert Sparks Seismic Activity
Metallica played their first concert at Virginia Tech's Lane Stadium Wednesday, where the crowd's rapturous reaction to 'Enter Sandman' — which has doubled as the Hokies football team's intro music for the past half-century — triggered the Richter scale. The Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory measured the sold-out crowd's response to the Black Album classic, with singer James Hetfield prompting the performance with a chant of 'Hokies! Let's Go!' When the 60,000-person crowd started jumping up and down when Lars Ulrich's drum beat kicked in, the movement was enough magnitude to create a noticeable spike on the seismograph equivalent to a 'small' but prolonged earthquake: More from Rolling Stone Metallica Announce Deluxe 'Load' Reissue With More Than 30 Hours of Music Metallica, Billy Joel Docs, Miley Cyrus Visual Album Lead 2025 Tribeca's Music-Heavy Lineup 'Metallica Saved My Life' Documentary Teaser Celebrates Four Decades of Fandom Family For the past 25 years, 'Enter Sandman' has served as the soundtrack for when the Hokies football team run out onto their home field on gameday, and according to Hokies Daily, even the fans' reaction to the recorded version of the track has shaken the seismograph, like before big matchups versus Miami in 2011 and Ohio State in 2021. Like the football team, Metallica themselves took the stage to a prerecorded version of 'Enter Sandman' before closing out the concert with the actual performance of the track. 'Experiencing that live, the actual band playing it rather than the games because we already get hyped from the games themselves, but hearing Metallica playing in the stadium live, it's awesome, man,' Virginia Tech junior Luke Dalton told ABC News 13. Prior to the band's first-ever concert at Lane Stadium, Metallica met with Hokies football coach Brent Pry, who presented them with the team's jerseys with the numbers 25 (for how long 'Enter Sandman' has been the intro music) and 72, to mark their current M72 Tour. 'It all starts with 'Enter Sandman,'' Pry told Hokies Daily. 'There's no better entrance in college football.' ('Enter Sandman,' notably, was previously the intro music for Hall of Fame New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera.) Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Forbes
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Metallica Announce Long Awaited ‘Load' Remaster Deluxe Boxset
Metallica has finally announced the deluxe remaster for their notorious 1996 LP, Load. The news comes from the band's social media pages, where they announced pre-orders for the remaster and its release date which is slated for June 13th. Since 2016, Metallica has been going through the process of reissuing and remastering their studio albums. For every remaster the band has done an intricate 'deluxe boxset' which often contains tons of memorabilia from the album-tour cycle and sometimes bonus tracks or live recordings from the time. Sitting at a staggering $278 price tag, the boxset for Load is just as ambitious as all previous deluxe edition boxsets Metallica has released. Here's what's inside the box: It's amazing the effect that time can have on the perception of art, specifically music. Metallica's 1996 album Load was one of the most polarizing albums to ever grace the metal scene back in the 90s, and for many fans it was considered band's worst album at the time. If 1991's the Black Album was Metallica experimenting with hard-rock and arena-metal, then Load was the band adopting slow groovy melodic songwriting and completely abandoning their metal aesthetics. Of course, at the time fans did not respond well to this stylistic change, nor was there any additional praise when Metallica decided to chop off their luscious locks – Metallica cutting off their hair was considered the nail in the coffin for many longtime fans. All that being said, many fans have since come around to Load and it's 1997 sequel album, Reload. Metallica routinely performs a select few tracks off both records, and some fans have found songs like 'Outlaw Torn' and 'Bleeding Me' to be some of the band's most underrated tracks. It's clear there's a hunger for Metallica' 90s sound, now more than ever. Knowing how well Metallica's reissues sell, it'll be interesting to see what kind of impact the Load remaster has on the Billboard charts when it drops in mid-June.
