Metallica’s Heavy New Box Set Unpacks the Experiments They Tried to Sneak Into Headbanger History

Metallica’s ReLoad box set lands as a weighty archival drop—five vinyl LPs, fifteen CDs, four DVDs, and a seven-inch—compiling the debris from two of the most scrutinized albums in hard rock history. It isn’t a victory lap so much as a chance to study a band pulling hard against its own legend.

The mid-Nineties context is well-worn: grunge and alternative had upended the rock order, and arena-metal acts were scrambling for relevance. Metallica’s response on Load (1996) and ReLoad (1997) translated less to a wholesale genre switch than to looser songwriting, bluesier riffs, and James Hetfield applying the first real singing lessons he’d taken into the Black Album. The resulting looseness—and the haircuts, guyliner, and bodily-fluid-stained CD booklets that accompanied it—provoked fan backlash that still lingers. Yet both albums went to Number One.

The box set foregrounds just how far that experiment stretched. There’s a banjo-driven acoustic take on the Misfits’ “Last Caress,” with Blues Traveler’s John Popper honking harmonica behind crooned murder-ballad lyrics. DJ Spooky reimagines “For Whom the Bell Tolls” as trip-hop, twisting Cliff Burton’s bass line into illbient shapes. Rob Overseer grafts Dave Grohl’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” drum break onto “Enter Sandman.” The selections aren’t anarchic by chance; they reflect a band with resources and a genuine, if awkward, desire to see how a metal framework might hold stranger material.

Commercially, ReLoad repeated its twin’s chart success, but the real story is how time has treated the recordings. The extra months the band took on that second album allowed more sonic range, and the box set’s deep cuts reinforce that ReLoad was the more deliberate sibling. The collection doesn’t rewrite the era—purists won’t suddenly champion “Mama Said”—but it clarifies why the late-Nineties Metallica outlier still has echoes in rock radio. It’s a heavy object that asks a simple question: when a juggernaut stops sprinting and starts poking around the margins, what does it leave behind worth revisiting?