What genre is St. Anger?

It's usually agreed that Metallica's St. Anger isn't a very good album. What's not agreed is what genre it's actually supposed to be.

Here on MMA for example we have it pegged as thrash metal.

On RYM the vote has turned up Alternative Metal. You can see a number of other suggestions for it's genre there as well, with some claiming it's not even metal, but hard rock. Some people have even voted for it as noise rock, post-hardcore or garage rock.

Wikipedia has it down as heavy metal. This is also the top tag for it on Last.fm.

I've seen it described as many more things that this including nu-metal, groove metal, stoner metal, speed metal and many other things that don't make any sense to me. I've even seen some people call it progressive or avant-garde metal.

Personally I think of it as simply their attempt at making a modern sounding metal album, which I suppose fits alternative metal the most.

Discuss.

Well I'm one of those few people who doesn't think St. Anger is that bad of an album, I think it has some great tracks on it (albeit being a bit too long).

aglasshouse wrote: Don't lump it in with alternative metal just because you don't like it.

I lumped it in nu-metal because I don't like it...

I guess the rationale behind calling it nu-metal comes down to two things:

Speaking from a point of experience as well as considering the time frame the album was released in, St. Anger is not alternative metal. Thrash isn't correct either though. Personally what I'm leaning towards is plain Heavy but I'm not exactly qualified to speak on the behalf of something like groove mainly because of my similar lack of knowledge. Khaliq may be able to better explain his feelings towards his groove opinion but that aside trad. is my personal best bet.

Trad is just more all encompassing than alternative metal, especially seeing as in 2003 alternative metal was still a derivative form of it's more recent self, with more post-grunge and alternative rock elements. Sure it's more diverse now but in the early 2000s alt metal was actually quite stagnant. Traditional goes back much longer and similarly can have many diverse sounds lumped under it. Just my opinion.

We've been talking about asking M@X to drop the 'traditional' part of the sub-genre's name. Just have Heavy Metal. There's a lot of stuff including many modern bands that definitely aren't alternative metal that fit there, so dropping the traditional part of the name makes a lot of sense.

I'd take St. Anger in heavy metal over thrash metal any day. I'm more neutral on the heavy vs alternative argument though. Either one works for me.

Edited by 666sharon666 - 14 Feb 2017 at 9:27am

666sharon666 wrote: We've been talking about asking M@X to drop the 'traditional' part of the sub-genre's name. Just have Heavy Metal. There's a lot of stuff including many modern bands that definitely aren't alternative metal that fit there, so dropping the traditional part of the name makes a lot of sense.

I see it as alternative metal myself. Alternative means "outside the norm" but not weird enough for avantgarde or progressive. While nu metal may have been an influence it's not that either becaue they keep some ties to thrash compositional approaches even if the familiarities had been deemphasized. I actually like it better than most as well, much better than the 90s output after the black album

Hey just so we're clear on something (not saying that anyone has implied anything) I didn't start this topic to contest the album's placement on MMA. It's just that so many different sites list the album as a different genre and I was curious about what everyone thought. I actually assumed the collab version of this discussion would have been done long ago and that thrash had been settled on.

Though as no one here does consider it thrash maybe it should be moved.

I see your point, but some collabs have in the past objected to the more modern sounding (so called melodic metal) bands being placed in the sub-genre for not being 'traditional enough' which in my view is wrong.

But more to the point, 'heavy metal' on its own is the more used name. I know some prefer to say traditional heavy metal to differentiate from the genre as a whole, but it's more correct to say 'metal' is the genre as a whole and 'heavy metal' is a sub-genre.

We're talking about a re-name only, not a change in how the sub-genre is run.