Metal Edge Presents
Highlights
THE 5 GREATEST EPs OF ALL TIME, RANKED BY METAL EDGE READERS
The EP has always been the industry's utility format: cheap to record, fast to release, useful for holding a band's place in the racks while an album gets sorted out. Readers voted for five of them, and the results skew hard toward records made in a hurry, several of them paid for by the bands themselves while the labels were still deciding whether to care. 5. Slayer, 'Haunting the Chapel' Brian Slagel wanted product. Show No Mercy was outselling everything else on Metal Blade's roster, "Chemical Warfare" and "Captor of Sin" were already going over live, and he sent the band back into the studio months before there was an album to make. They cut three songs quickly at Track Record in North Hollywood, in a drum room with a bare floor that the session fought the entire time. Dave Lombardo spent those weeks around Gene Hoglan, and the next several years of his playing carry the mark of it. Thirteen minutes, all of it moving at the speed of a band already halfway to Hell Awaits. 4. Ratt, 'Ratt' Ratt reached 1983 with years of San Diego-to-Hollywood club dates behind them and no offers in front of them, so they pressed the record themselves on their own Time Coast imprint. Robbin Crosby's girlfriend, Tawny Kitaen, posed for the cover. "You Think You're Tough" and "Sweet Cheater" did the work inside it. Six songs, no distribution to speak of, and it reportedly cleared 100,000 copies, which for an unsigned hard rock band that year was close to unheard of. Atlantic came around after Out of the Cellar broke and reissued it in 1984 with a cleaner mix and a band photo built for MTV. The 1983 pressing is louder, cruder, and still the one collectors go looking for. Shop Metallica 3. Metallica, 'The $5.98 E.P. — Garage Days Re-Revisited' The gap in Metallica's schedule opened for the worst possible reason. Cliff Burton's death had left them without a bassist and, for a long stretch, without a reason to write; the follow-up to Master of Puppets stopped where it stood. What came out instead was five covers — Diamond Head, Holocaust, Killing Joke, Budgie, the Misfits — most of them already half-learned in Lars Ulrich's garage, tracked in part to find out what Jason Newsted could do in a room with the other three. He came out of it a member of the band. "Helpless" and "Crash Course in Brain Surgery" swing with a looseness Metallica hadn't allowed itself since Burton was alive, and there's a deliberately mangled pass at "Run to the Hills" tucked into the runout for anyone patient enough to sit through it. Shop Alice In Chains 2. Alice in Chains, 'Jar of Flies' Alice in Chains came off the road broke and evicted, booked a week at London Bridge Studio with nothing written, and walked out with Jar of Flies. It debuted at No. 1, the first EP in Billboard history to manage that, on roughly 141,000 copies in its opening week behind "No Excuses" and "I Stay Away." Jerry Cantrell has traced the title to a grade-school science fair project involving two jars of flies, one fed well and one fed almost nothing. They had tried the acoustic thing already, on 1992's Sap, which played like an experiment run between albums. This one has arrangements — the strings on "I Stay Away," Mike Inez's first real writing credits — and it holds together as a record that happens to be short. 1. Queensrÿche, 'Queensrÿche' The record readers put on top was another one the band paid for itself. Before Queensrÿche there was The Mob, four teenagers working through Priest and Maiden covers around the Pacific Northwest for whoever would book them. Chris DeGarmo kept bringing songs of his own to rehearsal until the covers stopped being the point, and in 1982 the band booked time at Triad Studios and borrowed a singer, Geoff Tate, on loan from another local group, to get four of them on tape. They pressed the results on a label they invented for the occasion. Copies reached England, the press there got loud, and EMI America signed a Bellevue covers act on the strength of a demo it had nothing to do with, then put that demo back in stores in 1983. "Queen of the Reich" is what carried it: DeGarmo at full tilt, and Tate going up into the operatic register and staying there past the point where it sounds physically available. Fates Warning, Crimson Glory, every band that decided a metal singer could be a tenor and a metal song could have movements — a decade of American metal traces back to these four songs.
ASAVA MADE A DETECTIVE SHOW. THEN THEY HAD TO SCORE IT.
Photo: Shelly Duncan "Saveyourself," out today, is the latest single from Mahjong, the Canton, Ohio band's forthcoming album. It's also the newest episode of How Long Is Forever?, the serialized detective saga ASAVA has been threading through its videos since 2025's self-released Mantras. Every previous chapter, including "Leigh" and "Rue," started the usual way: finish the song, then shoot the video. This time the band cut the episode first, went looking through their catalog for something that matched its tone, and came up empty. "So we wrote one for it," frontman Liam Brocious says. "Essentially our first score we made for an episode." The episode plays like a self-contained short film. Two detectives (played by members of the band) grind through a missing-person case with the flat procedural rhythm of a network crime drama — until the killer surfaces, and the episode takes off running. The chase ends at another house entirely, one that abandons the network-TV palette for Seven territory — with a few frames of infrared thrown in, a blink-and-miss-it nod to The Silence of the Lambs. The song follows the episode's rhythm. It opens in eerie, ambient electronics, closer to the weightless dread of Nine Inch Nails' "A Warm Place" than anything with a breakdown, and hangs there just long enough for the investigation to settle into routine. When the song tears open, you already know why. Writing to a locked picture, Brocious says, meant serving two masters: the song had to hit its cues, but it also had to survive on its own as "a great, relistenable rock song in its own right." Getting there took "a lot of time and iterations." ASAVA is Brocious, bassist Greg Cochran, drummer Spencer Cindia, and guitarist Zach Rusher. Mahjong arrives August 28.
READER POLL: THE 5 BEST ALICE IN CHAINS SONGS OF ALL TIME
Metal Edge readers rank the five greatest Alice in Chains songs of all time.
