A snake is pictured on the cover of Metallica’s self-titled album, commonly called The Black Album.
The cover is predominantly black and features a subtle coiled snake near the lower-right area, along with the band’s logo. The restrained design differs sharply from the elaborate fantasy imagery associated with some earlier heavy-metal album covers.
The snake connects visually with the song “Don’t Tread on Me,” whose title and lyrics refer to the Gadsden flag and its famous rattlesnake emblem. The image is easy to miss because it is deliberately low-contrast rather than brightly illustrated.
The album’s official title is Metallica, but the dark artwork led listeners to call it The Black Album. That nickname is widely used even though it does not appear as the formal title on the record’s release information.