Load received mixed reviews from critics but was a commercial success, debuting and spending four consecutive weeks at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart.
[12] It was certified 5× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipping five million copies in the United States.
Load, released approximately five years after the commercially successful album Metallica, saw the band shifting toward hard rock and further away from their thrash metal roots.
Metallica had listed several artists and bands from which they took inspiration while writing Load and Reload that strayed from the types of bands that influenced them for their earlier albums, including Kyuss, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Primus, ZZ Top, Pantera, Corrosion of Conformity, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, and even more mainstream acts like Oasis, Alanis Morissette, and Garth Brooks, among others.
In place of staccato riffs, Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett experimented with blues rock-based tones and styles.
The album's lyrical themes show a striking departure from Metallica's previously social and politically charged subjects; many of Load's tracks discuss themes of depression, including "Bleeding Me", "Mama Said", and "Until It Sleeps", all of which are about the death of Hetfield's mother, and "The Outlaw Torn", which is said to be about the band coping with Cliff Burton's death.
Other songs, such as "The House Jack Built" and "Cure", discuss themes of drug and alcohol addiction, and "Thorn Within" and "Poor Twisted Me" reflect James's struggles with depression.
With the CD length at 78:59, initial pressings of the album were affixed with stickers boasting of its long playtime, simply reading "78:59".
Hammett states: I started tuning to E-flat for my riff tapes because I copied a lot of the Hendrix stuff.
[20] 10 songs from the album have been played live including "King Nothing", "Until It Sleeps", "Ain't My Bitch", "Bleeding Me", "Wasting My Hate", "Hero of the Day", "The Outlaw Torn", "2 X 4", "Poor Twisted Me", "Mama Said".
It is one of three photographic studies that Andres Serrano created in 1990 by mingling bovine blood and his own semen between two sheets of Plexiglas.
[24] In a 2009 interview with Classic Rock, Hetfield expressed his dislike of the album cover and its inspiration: Lars and Kirk were very into abstract art, pretending they were gay.
These photographs depict the band in various dress, including white A-shirts with suspenders, Cuban suits, and gothic.
"[29] Melody Maker expressed reservations about Load's heaviness compared to its predecessors: "A Metallica album is traditionally an exhausting event.
"With Load, it was disappointing that some people's reaction to the music was biased by how they dealt with the pictures – the hair and all that crap [see Artwork, above].
People have come up to me years afterwards and said, 'I never gave the record a fair chance because I couldn't get beyond Jason Newsted wearing eyeliner.'