As a kid who was bullied daily for 3 years straight in junior high school, I was relieved the moment I graduated and moved as far as I could from the school I was enrolled in.

My experience was so bad that any music the bullies enjoyed I ended up disliking for ages.

Metallica, El Tri, Caifanes, and a few more were on the verboten list, so I never had much love for them.

90s Metallica didn’t change my mind at all, but I ended up getting S & M mostly due to Michael Karen’s fantastic arrangements and not Metallica per se.

Jump now to September 2003. I’ve just delivered my MSc thesis and I’m beyond exhausted. Waking up takes ages. Walking feels like a living dream. Food has no taste. It was just the feeling I had during those three years of constant bullying.

I’m in HMV in Nottingham. Lost and perusing music to pass time. Dirty window from St. Anger blasts from the speakers and for some reason or other, I buy St. anger.

An album for people who don’t like Metallica. No wonder I like the ugliness that permeates throughout. The nasty sensation, lingering like incense in an abandoned church.

All the stress I felt, all the frustration from experiments that went wrong, break ups, and extensions, exploded with the album. The grit from Dirty Window. The uneasiness of The Unnamed Feeling (my absolute fave track from the album). The obvious ferocity of All Within My Hands. I chuckled when my friend Claudia, a lover of old Metallica, sent me an email saying she’d seen the video for St. Anger and hope they had stayed in prison for real.

I know people hate this album and I understand your reasons. But it’s an album I need when I feel horrible. That unnamed feeling does wander away whenever I press play and sing frantic tic tic tic tock.

-Sam J. Valdés López