“My Friend of Misery” was originally intended to be an instrumental on Metallica’s The Black Album.
The song began with a main riff written by bassist Jason Newsted. During the album’s development, the band transformed the idea into a vocal track rather than preserving it as an instrumental. That change produced the finished song heard as track 11 on the original record.
The arrangement retains a brooding, spacious character that suits the song’s title and subject matter. Its development is also an example of how Metallica’s studio writing did not always follow a fixed plan: instrumental sketches could become full songs through collaborative arranging and lyric writing.
This fact is easy to confuse with the album’s overall structure. The Black Album contains no fully credited instrumental track in its original 12-song sequence, but “My Friend of Misery” is connected to an instrumental concept during its creation. The working purpose describes its origin, not its final format.