Metallica’s debut album Kill ‘Em All is a stone-cold basic, a touchstone of thrash steel with clearly traceable influences, together with Motorhead, Venom and Mercyful Destiny. However what if the Bay Space quartet had taken affect from a band on their facet of the pond?
A band like ZZ High?
Musician and content material creator Denis Pauna has introduced that hypothetical situation to life with a latest efficiency of Kill ‘Em All performed in its entirety within the fashion of that little ol’ band from Texas. You may hearken to his creation, lovingly dubbed High ‘Em All, under. It is also out there on streaming companies.
Pauna posted the full-album efficiency on July 31, six days after the fortieth anniversary of Kill ‘Em All. It follows his well-received, Southern-fried rendition of “Search & Destroy.”
Inexplicably, the entire album works terrifically as a bluesy, Southern-rock romp. Songs like “The 4 Horsemen” and “Whiplash” turn out to be greasy, midtempo jams, with Pauna nailing the laidback pocket grooves of Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, in addition to Billy Gibbons’ spicy blues licks and grizzled vocals.
Launched on July 25, 1983, Kill ‘Em All helped usher the burgeoning thrash steel subgenre into the mainstream and started Metallica’s path to world domination in earnest. Its full-speed-or-nothing strategy wasn’t a concerted effort on the band’s half, however one thing that occurred naturally.
“It was one thing that we had been simply doing collectively,” drummer Lars Ulrich informed Metallic Hammer in 2022. “I do not sit right here and go, ‘I did this, he did that.’ All of us simply ended up residing collectively, being on prime of one another 24/7. We drank the identical beer, ate the identical shitty meals, listened to the identical music, such as you do whenever you’re 18 or 19 years previous. I do not suppose one individual was extra answerable for this than another man was. It was extra us simply attempting to make it heavier and sooner and extra over-the-top.”
Metallica Albums Ranked
There are moments of indecision when compiling this checklist. In any case, we actually may have had – for the primary time ever – a three-way tie for first.
