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.
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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.
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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.
