Editor’s Note: Metallica’s The Black Album was released 35 years ago today (August 12th, 1991). With their fifth LP, a self-titled effort better known as “The Black Album”, Metallica’s popularity skyrocketed from metal heroes to international rock superstars. “Hey, the Metallica ‘Black Album’ brought women to metal,” former Rip magazine editor Lonn Friend once said in the book, Survival of the Fittest: Heavy Metal in the 1990s. “I look at ‘The Black Album’, and it’s like, ‘The album still would have been the biggest rock album of all-time if you snuck in a couple of fast ones.’ But there is simply no denying that “The Black Album” is the release that made Metallica a household name.