Metalhead Shows Us What Metallica, Pantera + Slayer Sound Like Without Distortion

Distortion is to metal songs as ketchup is to french fries. Translation: you can't have one without the other. Well, you can, we guess. But what's the damn point of that?! One skilled metalhead guitarist decided to imagine an alternate distortion-free universe, and the results are pretty freaky.

YouTuber VAALVLA stripped away the fuzz and played a batch of metal classics totally straight. Some, like Slayer's "Angel of Death," sound surprisingly good—kind of like an early Dick Dale record. Others, like "Enter Sandman," definitely suffers from the lack of guitar growl.

Overall, it's an interesting experiment, but we're gonna go ahead and say that the originals rock way harder.