At the 1992 Grammy Awards, Metallica won Best Metal Performance for the album Metallica.
The award recognized the band’s self-titled fifth studio album, which is widely known as The Black Album. It followed Metallica’s earlier Grammy wins for “One” and for its cover of Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy,” giving the band three consecutive victories in the category.
The 1992 win was significant because the album had brought Metallica to a much broader audience while retaining its heavy-metal identity. The category’s recipients could be songs or albums, and in this year the winning work was the full album rather than an individual track.
The result is also part of a larger Grammy history involving Metallica. The band had controversially lost the first award in the earlier combined hard-rock and metal category to Jethro Tull, but later established a strong record in the dedicated metal category.