Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Published December 10, 2019 by with 0 comment

Metallica Song Tempos Over Time

Metallica has changed styles several times through their career. Does this show up in the song tempos over time/by album?
An obvious first plot is simply song tempos vs albums. I used all their full albums of originals (not including Lulu):

Kind of hard to see what's going on with so many points. Let's try box plots of the same thing:

A bit easier to see...they slowed down steadily from Kill 'em All to Load, most songs on Load were about the same tempo, and they've sped up since then. The table below has the medians of each album:
AlbumMedian bpm
Kill 'em All159.5
Ride the Lightning147
Master of Puppets158
and Justice for All122
Metallica117.5
Load115
Reload130
St. Anger111
Death Magnetic126.5
Hardwired to Self-Destruct133.5

In terms of individual songs, 'Master of Puppets' is the fastest at 220 bpm and 'Nothing Else Matters' is the slowest at 46 bpm.

Finally, here's all songs from all albums put into a single violin plot:

This all matches my gut feeling from listening to them over the years.

All tempos were taken from here.

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