Anger is not enough. You need death, gore, apocalyptic dread and a whole lot of pummeling double kick-drum to make a truly great metal album. Metallica knew this. Early on, they honed those basic elements into a kind of militaristic code and demonstrated their efficacy through four perfectly brutal, innovative albums, from the berserker whiplash of Kill 'Em All in 1983 to the controlled and cynical … And Justice for All in 1988. But in the '90s, while becoming some kind of stadium--filling, radio-dominating monster, they strayed far from their course-let us never speak of the symphonic S&M again-and even recorded an album while in the midst of group therapy. Those sessions yielded a juicy documentary, but also the psychobabble of 2003's St. Anger, a labored, awkward effort.

Enter Rick Rubin, Mr. Get Back to Where You Once Belonged. The man who produced- five Slayer albums and helped Johnny Cash craft his own stark epitaph has coaxed out Metallica's speed-metal demons for the band's most focused and viscerally satisfying work since the Black Album, 17 years ago. From the first track, "That Was Just Your Life," it's fast as hell, and nearly every song unfolds like a chase, with James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett's artillery riffs and Lars Ulrich's churning drums delivering the sound of unremitting fate. "We hunt you down without mercy/Hunt you down all nightmare long," barks Hetfield, the Cerberus of this inferno. He indulges in gruesome imagery with distinctive cruel relish ("Mangled flesh, snapping spine/Dripping bloody valentine") and syntaxes rarely heard outside of ESL night classes ("Spinning sand we will not find").

Even at their most elaborate, Metallica songs are finely wrought killing machines with not a part to spare, and the gore obsession here is more than horror-movie boilerplate. In the venerable tradition of metal's single-minded bogey-men-iron men, powerslaves, wrathful Norse gods-Hetfield comes alive with the taste of blood, embracing the instinct to aggression "like a face that learns to speak when all it knew was how to bite." The violence is constant and extreme, like Itchy and Scratchy given an ammo budget, but Hetfield's hungry gulp of air preceding the last chorus to "All Nightmare Long" is a reminder of the humanity behind the gears of these songs.

Rubin pointed the direction, but credit goes to the band-which, for the first time on record, includes new bassist Robert Trujillo-for recapturing their old sound and reconciling it with what followed. "The End of the Line" and "Cyanide" seamlessly fold in the grungy blues-mosh of the Load era, and the first single, "The Day That Never Comes," is a quiet-to-loud-to--really-loud saga à la "One." Roving guitar solos pay playful homage to 1970s influences Thin Lizzy and Iron Maiden, and the knotty songs stretch to six, seven, even nine minutes as Hetfield roars about death, death, death.

As Grand Guignol theater it works in almost every case. But Hetfield isn't the same beer-guzzling buck who made Kill 'Em All. In order to step into his old skin, he has to stifle the wisdom and experience he's gained. Complicated emotions can clog up the machinery; it's no coincidence that one of the few missteps here is the string-laden "The Unforgiven III," which is filled with depths of regret and pain.

St. Anger sought rational and humane meanings in the bloodlust but ended up with shallow confessions like "I want my anger to be healthy." The struggle for maturity was a poignant success in Some Kind of Monster, but it distracted the band from its inspiration: its core brutality. On Death Magnetic, the instinct for cruelty turns out to be an even more liberating form of therapy.

Download "All Nightmare Long," "That Was Just Your Life," "Cyanide"

Check out Blender's In The Studio coverage with Metallica