Metallica’s third album, and the one most people point to when they want to win the argument. Made in Copenhagen at Sweet Silence Studios with producer Flemming Rasmussen, it arrived in 1986 with no singles and no videos, just eight tracks and a support slot on Ozzy Osbourne’s tour to carry it. That was enough. It went gold, then kept going, and has now sold somewhere near ten million copies worldwide. It is also the last album bassist Cliff Burton finished in the studio; he died that September, and his hand is all over how the record breathes between the heavy parts. Decades on it became the first metal album the United States Library of Congress added to its National Recording Registry, the federal list of recordings kept for preservation. A loud record, made carefully, by a band that did not yet know what it was about to lose.