The night Metallica hosted the world's biggest ever listening party

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Metallica were on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s biggest bands as they arrived at the release of The Black Album, but just a few weeks out there were still some doubts about whether they’d made the right decision to streamline their thrash-metal sound. “We knew we had something that was radically different… I was a little nervous,” guitarist Kirk Hammett told Revolver magazine in 2021, “because we did not have any sort of precedent for that kind of approach or sound in the four albums before that.”

The nerves were undoubtedly ramped up a little by the fact that they had decided to launch the record with what has been described as “the world’s largest listening party”, playing The Black Album through an enornodome PA at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden for an arena full of fans on August 3, 1991. If anyone needed a sign that Metallica were thinking big on their fifth record, this was it.

“This is a very weird experience,” said Lars Ulrich in an interview with MTV at the time, “being a room like this with 15,000 people or whatever. We can’t go up and play. We’ll be walking round the backstage and going, ‘What do we do now?’. Plus we haven’t played for 14 months and we’re really out of shape. The annoying thing is that our album played the Garden before we did.”

Any fears they harboured would soon be allayed. The band could see for themselves just how much fans were into the new material. “The place was going crazy,” remembered Hammett, “even through Nothing Else Matters. People were just hooting and hollering.”

Whilst their record was already headlining one of the world’s biggest venues, the band were getting their road legs in much smaller settings, unveiling some of their new material at a warm-up show at the Phoenix Theatre in Petaluma, California. Ulrich told MTV it was important for them to get back out there and onto the stage again. “You can rehearse in a little room forever and forever,” the drummer said. “That’s not really what makes a difference. What makes a difference is getting out there and playing in front of people, getting your chops together in front of an audience. This side of us, just going out and playing to 800 people or a thousand people, that’s something we’ll never get away from because it’s something we like doing so much, having people right in your face. We like the intimacy of the whole thing.”

It's been a while since they dialled it down to that degree, though. The band are currently still on the mammoth M72 World Tour trek, at the moment making its way across North America.