Metallica
Formed in a garage, it was the band that, over nearly half a century, lifted thrash metal onto the largest stages in the world.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and associates ⏳🌊
- MemberJames Hetfield
Handling rhythm guitar and vocals, he became the face of the band.
- MemberLars Ulrich
Alongside the drums, he took charge of the band's business decisions.
- MemberCliff Burton
Drawing on classical and jazz idioms, he gave the band harmonic depth.
- MemberKirk Hammett
Joining in 1983, he played lead guitar for decades to come.
- RivalryDave Mustaine
He played lead guitar in the early days, then left and formed Megadeth, becoming a longtime rival.
- ProducerBob Rock
Producing the 1991 album Metallica (the Black Album), he carried the band to mainstream success.
I. The Los Angeles newcomers · 1963–1982
(Formation) The band was formed in 1981 in Los Angeles, California. The first meeting came about when James Hetfield answered an ad that drummer Lars Ulrich had placed in the music paper “The Recycler” — a call for a metal guitarist to play with. (Hetfield) James Hetfield was born in August 1963 in Downey, California. He lost his mother in his teens, and his family's religious convictions are said to have played a part. His father is also said to have left the family early on. Anger, mistrust and the sense that he had to protect himself would later be etched deep into nearly everything he wrote. (Ulrich) Lars Ulrich was born in December 1963 in Denmark. His father, Torben Ulrich, was a professional tennis player and a jazz lover who played rock and jazz records for young Lars without end. In 1980 the family moved to Los Angeles; Lars took up tennis for a while but soon gave it up and fell headlong into British heavy metal. (Early lineup) With guitarist Dave Mustaine and bassist Ron McGovney on board, the first lineup took shape. They rehearsed in the garage of McGovney's parents' house and settled on the name Metallica. Raw, unpolished early recordings slowly began to spread through the underground scene.
Their first proper studio recording, written together by Hetfield and Ulrich, it shows the early band in its original form.
- The rapid-fire opening riff relies mostly on downpicking (striking the strings with downstrokes only), letting the raw, unpolished early sound come through as it was.
- The lead guitar on the album version was re-recorded by Kirk Hammett, who joined after Mustaine left. Mustaine's solo survives on the 1982 demo No Life 'til Leather.
- Hetfield's vocals sit far closer to a high, piercing shout than on later albums, capturing his voice before his style had settled.
- The rough mix, plainly the product of a small budget and little studio time, also preserves the texture of the underground scene of the period.
II. The lineup completed, and the charge · 1982–1986
(Changes) In 1983 Mustaine was out of the band. He later said he was told he was fired the moment he woke up in a New York hotel room and was put on a bus back to Los Angeles; he went on to form his own band, Megadeth, and became Metallica's longtime rival. (Kirk) Kirk Hammett came in as the new lead guitarist. Already active in another band, he is said to have joined the group quickly, and for decades afterward he would be responsible for the band's lead sound. (Cliff) With bassist Cliff Burton on board, the lineup was complete. Trained in classical music and jazz, he gave the band harmonic depth, and he persuaded the Los Angeles–based group to relocate near his home turf of San Francisco. Because of that decision, the band would from then on make its base in Northern California. (The charge) Beginning with the 1983 album Kill 'Em All, they released Ride the Lightning in 1984 and Master of Puppets in 1986 in quick succession. Each album added speed and precision, and the genre of thrash metal itself came close to being redefined with Metallica as its benchmark. As Burton's harmonic sense meshed with Hetfield's riffs, the band began to move beyond being merely a speed band.
With Cliff Burton's bass opening the whole song, it shows the band beginning to move beyond sheer speed.
- The song opens with Cliff Burton's bass alone, ringing like a bell through a wah-wah pedal (an effect that opens and closes the tone as if crying).
- A slow, heavy riff then enters and gradually picks up speed; this control of pacing is the greatest difference from the previous album.
- Lars Ulrich's double bass drumming (rapid strokes played with two pedals) drives the tempo of the closing section.
- The lyrics take the point of view of soldiers facing death on the battlefield.
The album's title track, it depicts addiction controlling a person like a puppet.
- Across a length of more than eight minutes, it contains a middle section that breaks free of verse–chorus structure, with a separate melodic passage in which two guitars play in harmony.
- Kirk Hammett's solo arrives after this middle section, serving as a bridge from the slow interlude to the renewed charge of the song's second half.
- Live, it is famous for the passage in the middle break where the crowd is drawn into clapping along.
III. Cliff's death and rebuilding · 1986–1988
(The accident) In September 1986, the tour bus overturned on an icy road while passing through Sweden. Cliff Burton was killed in the accident at the age of twenty-four. Not long after the funeral, the surviving members began auditioning for a new bassist. (Jason) Jason Newsted came in as the new bassist. (Justice) In 1988 they released the album ...And Justice for All. Its intricate, dry arrangements, unusually prominent guitars and comparatively buried bass would be argued over for years. The album earned the band its first Grammy nomination, but losing the award at the ceremony made even bigger headlines. (The weight of loss) Cliff's death pushed the band's music toward something darker and more restrained. War, loss and the fear of situations beyond one's control began to come to the fore in the lyrics, and this soon led to one of the best-known songs in the band's history.
The story of a soldier who has lost his limbs and senses to war, it is steeped in the sense of loss that deepened after Cliff's death.
- The opening begins with a clean-tone (a clear guitar sound without distortion) arpeggio, building tension as instruments are added one by one.
- The effect imitating machine-gun fire in the middle section is a device that translates the lyrics' battlefield imagery directly into sound.
- Hammett's tremolo-picking (striking a string in very rapid repetition) solo in the closing section is counted among the most famous solos of the band's entire career.
- The music video was cut together from scenes of the antiwar film “Johnny Got His Gun,” and, unusually for the time, it was a long video covering almost the entire song.
IV. The Black Album and mass appeal · 1990–1993
(The turn) In 1990 the band began work on a new album with producer Bob Rock. Rock pushed them to make the songs shorter and simpler; Hetfield and Ulrich resisted at first but in the end gave in. The result, the 1991 album Metallica — the so-called Black Album — was a worldwide success the moment it was released. (Mass appeal) Unlike the thrash albums before it, the songs were shorter and the choruses sharper. Some longtime fans saw it as a sellout, but a far larger public heard Metallica for the first time. The band moved from clubs to arenas. (Guns N' Roses) In 1992 they set out on a North American stadium tour with Guns N' Roses. During the Montreal show, Hetfield stepped too close to a pyrotechnic blast and was burned, leaving him unable to play guitar for the rest of the dates; there followed unusual nights when a guitar technician took the stage to play guitar in his place while Hetfield only sang. For years afterward, the two bands would be named side by side in rock history. (Money and contracts) The success of the Black Album brought the band enormous wealth. Members who had until then been bound to small labels and tight contracts found themselves, for the first time, in a position to set their own royalty terms, and this became the starting point for the band later speaking out on the recording industry as a whole.
The song that lifted the band to stadium scale, it shows most vividly the change brought about by their collaboration with producer Bob Rock.
- A short, simple four-note opening riff dominates the entire song — the polar opposite of the complex multi-movement structures of the earlier albums.
- Bob Rock's production captures the drums far bigger and wider, in sharp contrast to the dry texture of the earlier albums.
- In the bridge midway through, the voices of Hetfield and a child trading a bedtime prayer heighten the song's nightmarish atmosphere.
- With the length cut to just over five minutes, the song took on a shape that radio could play often.
Hetfield wrote it while absently humming during a long-distance call with the girlfriend he was seeing at the time, and for a long while he didn't play it even for the band.
- The song opens with a simple acoustic guitar arpeggio and leaves room to breathe, an openness unusual for a metal band.
- In the latter half, an orchestra arranged by composer Michael Kamen joins in, creating a rare moment when strings step to the very front of the band's sound.
- Hetfield's vocals here are unusually low and restrained, in contrast to his usual aggressive delivery.
- Hetfield has said he never originally meant to play the song for the band.
V. Years of upheaval · 1996–2004
(Transformation) In 1996 and 1997, as they released Load and ReLoad, they cut their hair short and shifted their sound closer to alternative rock. Some fans from the thrash days turned away once again, but the band did not stop changing. (Napster) In 2000, after discovering their songs being shared without permission, they filed suit against the file-sharing service Napster. (Rupture) In 2001, Jason Newsted left the band. That same year, Hetfield reportedly stepped away from the band for a time to seek treatment of his own accord. (Monster) The rupture and recovery of this period were captured in full in the documentary Some Kind of Monster. The scenes of the members sitting with a therapist and unloading their pent-up grievances at one another were said to lay bare the inner life of a rock band as never before. The 2003 album St. Anger was the result, carrying the sound of that turmoil and recovery just as it was.
The title track of the album born out of the band's therapy, it deliberately opts for a rough, unpolished sound.
- There isn't a single guitar solo on the entire album, a deliberate choice that put raw emotion ahead of flashy playing.
- Ulrich's snare drum was recorded with a distinctive ringing, metallic clang from the shell, which sharply divided fans when the album came out.
- Rather than a clearly repeating chorus, the song's structure leans toward riffs that run on irregularly, unlike the tidy forms of the earlier albums.
- The documentary Some Kind of Monster captures the studio process of the song's making just as it happened.
VI. Return and the present · 2003–2026
(Trujillo) In 2003, Robert Trujillo joined as the new bassist. The band reportedly paid an unusually large advance to bring him over from another well-known band, and for more than 20 years afterward the lineup held steady. (Return) With the 2008 album Death Magnetic, they went back to rough, intricate thrash-style arrangements. Continuing with Hardwired... to Self-Destruct in 2016 and 72 Seasons in 2023, they became one of the few long-lived bands still releasing new records more than 40 years after their founding. (Present) In the 2020s they continue to mount massive world tours, filling stadiums that hold tens of thousands. Hetfield and Ulrich remain the band's only founding members, with Hammett and Trujillo at their side. (Legacy) They are credited with lifting thrash metal into the mainstream of popular music. The band four young men started in a garage now stands as proof of how long, and how big, heavy metal can go.
Arriving some 30 years after their debut, the song stunned listeners by returning to the speed of the early thrash days.
- When it came out as a pre-release single, it held a tempo so fast that the mere fact they could still play at this speed became news.
- Hetfield's riffs are built mainly on downpicking, as in the early work, offering a deliberate return to the sound of some 30 years before.
- Producer Greg Fidelman's mix captures a clearer, firmer low end than before, adding modern heft to the old speed.
- At just over 3 minutes, the song is short, recalling the concise structures of the early albums.
Lesser-known stories
(Album title) The original title of the 1983 debut album was Metal Up Your Ass. When the distributor objected to the cover and title and refused them, Cliff Burton is said to have muttered something in half-resigned exasperation that became the new title as it stood — Kill 'Em All. (Band name) The origin of the band's name involves Ron Quintana, an acquaintance of Lars Ulrich. When Quintana was torn between two candidate titles for a metal fanzine he was preparing, 'Metal Mania' and 'Metallica', Ulrich urged him to use the first and took the second for his own band.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Thrash metal
(Meaning) Thrash is an English word meaning to beat and flail wildly, and metal comes from heavy metal. (In rock) An ultra-fast heavy metal genre born on the U.S. West Coast in the early 1980s, marked by fast tempos, distorted guitars, and rapid drumming driven by two pedals. Picture a guitarist raking the strings so fast the hands disappear, like a relay runner at a school sports day whose legs vanish into a blur.
Riff
(In rock) A short, repeated melodic pattern on guitar or bass that holds up an entire song. Think of it as a melody that keeps coming back every time the song starts and ends, like the bell that rings outside the school cafeteria at every break. (Elsewhere) In comedy, taking an improvised joke and repeating and building on it is also called a riff.
Downtuning
(In rock) A technique of tuning guitar strings below standard pitch to get a heavier, darker sound. Just as a jump rope held slack makes a duller sound, lowering a guitar string's tension makes it ring thicker and heavier.
Power chord
(In rock) A simplified chord that, unlike an ordinary chord stacking three or more notes, uses only two, the root and the fifth above it, to ring out thick and strong. It pairs especially well with a distorted guitar. A chord that would sound plain on the piano becomes a sound that hits you in the chest when strummed hard on a guitar.
Distortion
(Meaning) The English verb distort means to twist out of shape. (In rock) An effect that deliberately mangles the signal to create a rough, aggressive texture, produced by an amp or a stompbox (pedal). Just as shouting with a microphone held too close to a speaker produces a crackling buzz, it is that tearing sound created on purpose.
Overdubbing
(In rock) A method of recording new sound on top of an already recorded performance or vocal, used when one person layers several instruments alone or builds up a fuller sound. Just as layering colors in a painting gives it depth, sound too grows richer when stacked layer upon layer.