Metallica have a documentary coming soon about the impact their music has had on their fans, and at a festival screening last week, Lars Ulrich and director Jonas Akerlund took part in a post-show conversation about the film.

The film – entitled Metallica Saved My Life - was screened as part of the California Film Institute’s Mill Valley Film Festival and in amongst the questions you’d expect about its making, one attendee asked Ulrich what advice he would give to young artists looking to follow in Metallica’s footsteps.

"Stick with it. Focus,” the 61-year-old drummer said. “You've gotta put the time in. There are many different ways you can put the time in it.

"It could be in book form or at the receiving end of teaching or whatever. But you can also literally play guitars or drums or whatever you're doing and listen. There's no right or wrong path."

He continued: "I think it's pretty clear that with anything, you've gotta put the time in. Whether you're making films or running movie festival, film festivals or whatever, you've just gotta put the time in. And then maybe be honest with yourself about your motives.

"Now, again, there's no right or wrong motives. Do you wanna play music because the passion burns inside you? Do you wanna play music to get famous? Do you want to play music to get wealthy? There's nothing wrong or right with any of it.

"But don't bullshit yourself what your motives are, if you know what I mean, because that will also lead you to wherever it is you wanna go with probably fewer forks in the road or fewer obstacles."

Rather than a straightforward band doc, the film tells Metallica’s story through their fans and their own stories of identity, loss and redemption through the band’s music. It’s an interesting approach. The idea, Ulrich told the San Francisco Chronicle was to celebrate "the diversity and the depth and the dedication and the passion of Metallica fans.”

"We kept seeing the same faces in the front rows, and so getting an understanding of their back stories, that was the most eye-opening thing for me,” the drummer said.

At present, Akerlund is still trying to secure a distributor for Metallica Saved My Life. Ultich indicated at the event that it’s likely to have a theatrical release some time around spring 2026.

Lars Ulrich has been giving his thoughts about the passing of Ozzy Osbourne and the icon’s last gig at the Back To The Beginning show.

The Metallica drummer appeared on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show this week and was asked how Ozzy seemed in the run-up to the gig. "He was very eloquent and very sharp in his answer,” Ulrich explained.

“We were just sitting doing small talk, but it was so warm and he was very present, coherent. It was just his body that was not in good shape, but his mind … he was eloquent and talking and in the moment."

Ulrich, was one of the few who had seen Black Sabbath soundcheck and knew then that the reunited band would do a great job. "All the rest of us were just losing our f***ing minds and then they started playing War Pigs with the lights on and the show and air raid sirens and then we were obviously, as fans - and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here or being disrespectful - as fans I think there was a sense from all the other musicians and friends of Black Sabbath who were there.

"We were hoping for the best. We wanted it to be the best. We wanted it to be a grand slam, but we didn’t know, because ultimately none of us knew what kind of shape they were in ...

"Then Ozzy came in singing and sounded great, hit all the notes and the lyrics and the timings and everybody was like: 'This is gonna be fine, they’re gonna f***ing kill it'."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BTBQj5foVM

Meanwhile Sharon Osbourne has said that Ozzy was deeply moved by the outpouring of love at the Back To The Beginning gig. In fact, just days before he died, he apparently admitted as much to her.

“He turned around and he said to me that night, ‘I had no idea that so many people liked me’. Ozzy’s always been in his own bubble.”

Sharon was speaking to the online platform Pollstar and said of the Villa Park gig: “It was a huge success, because it was a phenomenal event. It was the first time, I think, that anybody’s gone into retirement and done it, where the show is streamed and it goes to charity. So it’s the first time anybody has said goodnight like that, it’s the perfect way, when you’ve had such a long career, to end it.”

She also revealed that she has been working on a BBC documentary about the gig and Ozzy’s final chapter. Entitled Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, it was filmed over the last three years of his life and will be screened on BBC1 on August 18.

It’s looking increasingly likely that Metallica will be the next big name to play a residency at Las Vegas’s Sphere venue.

Nothing has been confirmed as yet. But Vital Vegas has suggested that the band could be eyeing up a run of shows in autumn 2026.

Cut to Lars Ulrich being interviewed by Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show last night (6 August) and when Stern brought up the possibility of playing the Sphere, the drummer didn’t exactly distance himself from the rumours.

“I’m not going to confirm anything, because there’s nothing to confirm,” Ulrich told Stern. “ But I’m not going to deny it, because we’re all such fans of this venue. It’s something that we’re considering, [but] nothing is etched in stone or green-lit. It’s something that we’re looking at at some point when the 2026 tour is done.”

Ulrich said that he had seen the opening night of U2’s run at the venue in 2023 and had been “blown away” by what he saw. “It’s not signed, sealed and delivered, but speaking to me and asking my opinion I would fucking love to do it.”

This comes a few months after guitarist Kirk Hammett was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter and suggested that he was open to playing the Sphere. “Oh, heck, yeah!” he exclaimed. “That’s a great example of how venues are changing. That’s using modern technology to the fullest, to really up the levels of production and entertainment, connected to AI and making it a crazy experience.”

Stern also asked Ulrich about the possibility of Metallica doing the half time show at next year’s Super Bowl, which will be in the band’s hometown of San Francisco. And he seemed positive about that too, saying, emphatically: “Fuck yeah of course we would. First of all we would do it. Second of all to do it in San Francisco would be a dream come true and would be the right fit.

“Certainly as somebody who’s represented San Francisco all over the world and shouted for decades about San Francisco and our love for the Bay Area, that part of it is the right fit. Ultimately it’s not our decision.”

Mike Portnoy has been talking about some of his influences, and whilst he lists some iconic drummers you’d expect to be in there, he included one that might raise an eyebrow.

The Dream Theater drummer was chatting to the Youtube sensation El Estepario Siberiano and after singing the praises of Ringo Starr, Keith Moon and Neil Peart, turned his attention to a figure who’s often sneered at by some sections of the drumming community.

“Lars Ulrich (of Metallica), believe it or not, was a big influence for me,” he explained. “And a lot of people give him a hard time over his technique and everything, but, to me, he was an influence for me because it was more than just drums.”

“He was the leader of the band, he would write the setlist, he would deal with the fan clubs and the merchandise, and he was co-producing the albums and co-writing the music. He, to me, was a role model.

"And even to this day, he still is. More than just the drumming, his personality and his presence, he was so important for Metallica's success that, to me, that was the thing. And Neil Peart too - Neil wasn't just the drummer; he was the lyricist and he would oversee the artwork. So, it's drummers like that, that do more than just play the drums. Those are my role models."”

He went on to explain that it was also Ulrich’s style that has rubbed off on him: "(Lars) was a pioneer for the style of music that Metallica plays. When they came out in 1983, that was a game changer.

"They were inventing an entire style of music, and he was at the forefront of it. So, you've gotta give him credit for that. And those first four albums, his drumming was very progressive - very aggressive and progressive. It wasn't until the Black Album where he started to pull it back a little bit, but those first four albums I learned so much about metal drumming from those albums.”

To be fair, it’s not the first time Portnoy has given props to Ulrich. Back in 2015 he told Sticks For Stones that he “would rather watch somebody like Lars Ulrich on stage than one of these technical drummers that can do quadruple paradiddles at 240bpm. To me, that's boring. Who cares about that?"

And in 2017 he told Australia’s The Void: "I'll defend him (Ulrich) to the end. I'll tell you what: you don't have to be a great drummer to be the most important guy in the band. And that's what I learned from him."

Metallica could have packed it all in and walked away after the tragic bus crash that claimed the life of bassist Cliff Burton on 27 September 1986. But they didn’t. They persisted, recruiting Jason Newsted from Flotsam And Jetsam, and putting together the most audacious – perhaps the most brilliant – album of their career.

…And Justice For All was never going to be an easy record. Not for the band. Not for the audience. Even now, it sounds audacious. Never before or since have James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett committed such a hostile electric guitar tone to tape.

With its dense, byzantine arrangements, tricksy time signatures, and a mercilessly bleak atmosphere, …And Justice For All stands as the apogee of Metallica’s musical ambitions – at least as far as thrash metal was concerned.

Their debut album Kill ‘Em All helped inaugurate that art form in the summer of 1983. Ride The Lightning (1984) would widen the canvas, testing the hypothesis that headbanger savagery and a burgeoning appetite for musical progressivism could be held in perfect equilibrium, and two years later, the crystalline front-to-back perfection of Master Of Puppets presented material evidence that this hypothesis would hold true.

…And Justice For All doubled down on all that came before. It had to. And the album’s centre-piece, the anti-war epic One, realigned the stars for Metallica. Alternating between fatalist balladry of the verse and the rhythmically unwieldy riff violence of the chorus, before going full metal jacket on its rat-tat-tat second act, its explosive dynamics shattered the glass ceiling for underground metal bands.

Anything was possible now. In 1990, One even won Metallica their first Grammy for Best Metal Performance, after Jethro Tull famously usurped them the year previous. They broke their own rule, too, and shot a promo video.

But if it was instrumental in finding a wider audience it would do so on Metallica’s terms. One is all kinds of brutal, lyrically and musically. We could see One as the thematic successor to Disposable Heroes, or For Whom The Bell Tolls, or as completing a thrash power ballad trilogy that started with Fade To Black and Welcome Home (Sanitarium).

The song itself was inspired by the catastrophically injured protagonist in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, a war veteran who loses his limbs, sight, hearing and speech while his mind remains sharp, wishing for death. Hetfield’s lyrics give him a voice and they could scarcely be darker.

As with all the best ideas in metal, the inspiration for the melody came from Venom, whose B to G chord progression on Buried Alive [from the seminal 1982 album Black Metal] had been stuck in Hetfield’s brain, and he would find a use for it during the opening section for One. The thrash violence came after the fact.

“The kick drum machine-gun part near the end wasn’t written with the war lyrics in mind, it just came out that way,” Hetfield told Guitar World in 2009.

But the most significant modulation on One is not from B to G; it’s from those pristine clean tones those scooped EQ thrash tones courtesy of a Mesa/Boogie Mark C++ head.

By this point, Hetfield was a devotee of the Roland JC-120 Jazz-Chorus, the solid-state combo with onboard chorusing and a credible claim to being the best clean guitar amp of all time.

Would Hammett have used one too? Perhaps. But as he remembers it, in the same Guitar World interview as Hetfield's, the A/DA MP-1 preamp rack module was responsible for his cleans.

“I used an ADA preamp and an A/DA MP-1. It was a programmable digital amp that had tubes in it, with a separate rack-mounted Aphex parametric EQ,” said Hammett. “I remember blending that thing with the Boogies for lead sounds and clean sounds. The clean sound on One was done almost exclusively with the A/DA MP-1.”

Hammett’s guitar for the one sessions was his ESP KH-1, the all black first-generation S-style signature guitar from the brand with the skull-and-crossbones fretboard inlays. When speaking to Mark Agnesi for Gibson TV’s The Collection, Hammett described his KH-1 as a “Flying V in a Strat body” with one particular modification mandated by the demands of performing One live.

“All my ESP guitars have had the same specs ever since 1988 or ’89. It’s just paint jobs. That’s the only thing that changes,” he said. “There’s a slight scallop from like the 17th fret. It’s only so I can do the guitar solo for One. [Laughs] The only reason why it’s scalloped! That’s the only reason why. Nothing else. Because I am not a right-hand [tapping] technique guy.”

And yet on one he is, tapping out a pentatonic arpeggio in the upper registers. Hammett told Guitar World that he might have sweated over his lead parts on One but that tapping came easy. With Ulrich working those double kick drums, the staccato strobes and pyro of it all, how else could he play it?

“The main guitar solo at the end, with the right-hand, Eddie Van Halen-type tapping, came almost immediately,” said Hammett. “That guitar solo was just a breeze; what was going on with the rhythm section in that part of the song was just very, very exciting for me to solo over.”

The other solos, not so easy. Hammett credits Hetfield for inspiring his first solo. It came from a melody the Metallica frontman was playing around with. The clean picked arpeggios in the first solo came from a chord exercise but sounds anything but. As for the solo in the middle of One? Hammett was going to suffer for that. But this was never going to be an easy album.

…And Justice For All had a difficult birth. Mike Clink, who had produced Guns N’ Roses’ incendiary debut, Appetite For Destruction, was in the control room, only to be replaced by returning Master Of Puppets producer Flemming Rasmussen. The finished mix would immediately be controversial on account of Newsted’s bass guitar being all but inaudible.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2016, Hetfield admitted that a relentless touring schedule, epic sets at high-volume, had fried their hearing and this ultimately affected the mix – especially with Hetfield and Ulrich more involved in the control room.

“I know there’s quite a few people that love that record; there’s a real punchiness to it, and because it’s somewhat progressive, that does fit with it a bit,” said Hetfield. “You can hear things a little better.

“Obviously there’s not much depth to it as far as thickness goes and, you know, it is what it is because that’s Lars and I trying to venture into producing ourselves and discovering… Well, you can tell who produced it because the guitars and the drums and the vocals are really loud.”

The walls were closing in. Metallica were running out of time, and mixed …And Justice For All during their run on the 1988 Monsters Of Rock Tour, where they where sharing a bill with Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken and German hard-rockers Kingdom Come. Hetfield said this was fine while they were on the East Coast. As the tour ventured westwards it proved to be a logistical nightmare.

“On a day off, Lars and I would fly… well, fly or drive. Most of the times, drive,” he said. “I remember at the time limos were a big deal and it actually had leg room for me.

“Sleeping on an eight-hour drive in a limo to wherever from somewhere in Iowa or wherever when we were mixing this thing in upstate New York. So we were pretty fatigued, ear-fatigued as well. That’s a big factor in it, I think. There’s a lot more high-end and it had to cut through our deaf ears at that point.”

Physically, they were on their feet. Hammett had not yet finished all of his solos and time was of the essence. He, too, had to make the commute back to the Hit Factory in New York to track lead guitars under Rasmussen’s guidance.

“When we were recording that album I really didn’t have as much time to do the solos as I’d wanted to,” said Hammett. “I think we had to leave for the Monsters Of Rock Tour on a Saturday and it was Thursday but we were still recording guitar solos. I can remember showing up at 10 or 11 in the morning and working on solos and that leading to two or three o’clock in the morning the next day. It was just ridiculous: 15 or 16 hours of recording. And I had four or five days of that.”

Monsters Of Rock would have been an occasion to try out some of the new material but only Harvester Of Sorrow made it onto the setlist – which is ironic considering just how much trouble it was giving Hammett. That was one solo that he just couldn’t put away, and Rasmussen was not going to push him for it.

“I was so tired, it was so late at night and my fingers and hands were so fatigued that I had trouble bending a note in key to another note,” said Hammett. “I remember Flemming saying, ‘Okay, just bend it this much. Just bend it a half-step and I’ll take it up with the harmoniser for the other half-step.’ And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Is this really necessary, or can we just stop and do it all over again properly tomorrow?’ But there wasn’t a tomorrow. We had to do it that way.”

That middle section solo to One was still haunting Hammett. “I must have recorded and rerecorded it about 15 million times,” he told Guitar World. “I wanted a middle ground between the really melodic solo at the beginning and the fiery solo at the end.”

He didn’t get it. What he did get was more air miles and more late nights. He finally tracked it on the eve of their performance at the RFK Stadium, in Washington DC, on 10 June. He had the solo, a piece that could sit between the melodic grandeur of One’s first act and the artillery fire of the outro. The Washington show sucked but so what. One was complete.

It would make its live debut on 11 September 1988 at the MTK Stadion, Budapest, Hungary, on the opening night of the Damaged Justice tour, when Metallica, similarly damaged but renewed, would open a new chapter for the band.

…And Justice For All was the ne plus ultra of thrash metal progressivism. There was no way to top it. Maybe this was reason enough for Metallica to seek Bob Rock’s counsel and engineer a box-office refresh of their sound on 1991’s Black Album. But the momentum towards mega-stardom and the conquering of the world’s stadia was gained on the battle to finish One. Just as well. If you are going to perform it live, then you need a big venue with all those flash bombs and pyro going off.

• ...And Justice For All is out now via Rhino/Blackened.

27 September, 1986 was the darkest day in the history of Metallica, when the band’s bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a tour bus accident in Sweden during the Master Of Puppets tour.

But within two months, the band were back on the road to finish that tour with new bassist Jason Newsted alongside guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and drummer Lars Ulrich.

And as Lars explained in an interview with Sounds in January 1987, they never considered breaking up the band - and believed that Cliff would have wanted them to carry on.

"I don't understand how anyone who knows what this band is about could honestly think that we'd give up,” Lars said. “The question was not: are we gonna pack it in or not? It was: how fast can we get the whole thing back on its feet again?"

“First of all, Cliff would be the first one to get pissed off if we sat around and cried and whined and shit. Secondly, with all due respect to Cliff, it's, like, history, there's nothing we can do about it.

“For the five years that we've been doing this, Metallica's always been about fighting against all the shit that's been in our way. Something always comes up and we always push on.

"Obviously, there'd never been anything like the shock and the whole disaster of what happened in the accident, but we never thought of packing it in. And now it's like we have even more reason to continue because we have to do it for Cliff too, if you know what I mean."

"Cliff was the strongest of the four of us emotionally," Lars said. "And if he saw us sit around and feel sorry for ourselves for the next year on a couch in San Francisco he'd get pissed off. I know that he'd come round and kick us in the ass and tell us to get back out on the road and continue where we left off.

"I think everyone knew without even saying it to each other. It was just a matter of getting it out in the open.

“We had a meeting between the three of us and our management, and we decided that evening, which was the night before Cliff’s funeral, that we wanted to start as fast as we could.

“So we left the Japanese dates in the itinerary because we thought if we left them in — they were only about five weeks ahead — then that would give us the pressure of getting our shit together in a hurry so we wouldn't just sit around for six months.

"It was obvious from the beginning that we didn't want, with all due respect to Bob Daisley [veteran bassist, ex-Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne], a 35-year-old hired musician to come in. We wanted someone young, someone hungry, someone new, a bit 'unknown' or whatever, and not someone that people would associate with another band.

"We started asking around in the underground and at independent record labels about the happening young bass players. There wasn't really time to advertise it, and we weren't sure that we wanted it advertised anyway. We just sort of spread the word around, and Jason's name was, for some reason, the one that came up most.

"We started auditioning around October 20, just doing one song with each of them — in, out, next, see ya. We did about 60 people in one week and we decided that we wanted to ask four of them back.

“What we wanted to do was spend a whole day with each of the four of them because for us it's more than just about whether he can play a song well. The whole vibe and the attitude of the person, how we would get on with him and the friendship and all that was just as important.

"We set up each day of hanging out with the person and Jason was second of the four. We played all day and went out for a meal, and then we went for the big test which was obviously the drink test. And somehow, I swear it wasn't planned, me and James and Kirk ended up in the toilet together pissing.

"So we're standing there pissing at three in the morning, out of our faces, and all three of us weren't saying anything, and I just said without looking at anybody, ‘That’s him, right?’ And the other guys said. ‘Yeah, that's him.’ And that was it."

Lars Ulrich might receive way more than his fair share of bashing from other musicians, and while the St. Anger snare drum sound will never cease to divide opinion (or perhaps unite it for the wrong reasons), one thing that isn’t up for debate is that Lars’ drum sound on Metallica’s self-titled/Black Album is a benchmark for heavy drum sounds. Now, microphone manufacturer Lauten Audio has set about recreating the sound from scratch using the original kit, in the same live room Metallica tracked in. Luckily for us, it documented the whole process.

Recorded over months between 1990 and 1991 at LA’s One on One studios, the end result is a monstrous-sounding kit, and as we find out in the video, it’s the combination of great drums, expertly engineered in a very special room. Oh, and Lars’ playing might have had more than just a little to do with it.

At the core of the sound is, of course, are the drums. It’s well known that Lars’ use of the Tama Bell Brass snare on the Black Album helped to cement that drum’s status as the finest snare for rock and metal since the Ludwig Black Beauty. 

Lars and the band hired the drums for the Black Album sessions from the legendary Drum Doctors (Ross Garfield), who provided a huge nine-piece setup comprising the Tama Bell Brass, with the rest of the kit formed out of ’80s Gretsch shells. 

The full setup comprised a pair of Gretsch 24”x16” bass drums (finished in Walnut stain), and six toms ranging from 12”x10, 13”x11”, 14”x12” and 16”x14” rack toms (yes, those last two were suspended!), and an 18”x16” floor tom.

For Lauten’s video, Garfield – who still owns the kit – provided the exact drums Lars played over 30 years ago, and remained on hand to achieve the same tunings as used on the original recordings. 

Black Album assistant engineer, Mike Tacci, who helped Randy Staub and producer Bob Rock capture the cavernous sound in the ’90s advises on the placement of the drums in the room, as well as revealing that part of the secret to the black Albums huge, thumping tom sound comes from double mic’ing (a mic placed on the batter and resonant sides of each tom), as well as the cavernous-sounding live room.

Grammy award-winning producer/engineer, Darrell Thorp – whose day job is based at Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 – oversees the recording, while Puscifer/A Perfect Circle drummer, Gunnar Olsen does a great job of replicating Lars’ style for the recording.

Of course, as much fun as this is for those involved, there is another reason Lauten went to the effort of this exercise. Yesterday, the mic brand launched its new Tom Mic - a dedicated large diaphragm microphone designed specifically for capturing toms. 

For more information on the Lauten Audio Tom Mic, click here.

Some years are watershed moments in musical history, and 1991 was one of them. It was the year that grunge broke and that hair metal was given a shove out of the mainstream. It was also the year that Metallica released Metallica. Forever known as The Black Album, it was the record that capitalised on the success of their previous release, And Justice For All, and established the San Francisco quartet as the biggest metal band in the world.

Although it featured five hit singles – Nothing Else Matters, The Unforgiven, Sad But True, Wherever I May Roam and Enter Sandman – it was the latter that really caught the public’s imagination, reaching No. 5 in the UK chart. 

“It’s a riff and a song title pretty much,” James Hetfield revealed on a 1991 documentary about the genesis of the band’s songwriting process. “Especially since this time we’re doing the simpler tunes. One of the songs is like two riffs in the whole song with different singing over it, which is pretty cool.”

He’s talking about Enter Sandman. With its doomy, clean-picked minor-key riff, haunting lyric and massive sound, it was the track that set the template for the rest of The Black Album, both in sound and in atmosphere. 

Getting Bob Rock in as producer was key to Metallica’s maturing sound. The aptly named Rock was the man behind both Mötley Crüe’s Dr Feelgood, The Cult’s Sonic Temple, and he had mixed Bon Jovi’s massive Slippery When Wet and New Jersey albums. At first glance he was not necessarily the best bedfellow for a Bay Area thrash band, but as drummer Lars Ulrich explained Metallica had “not been too happy with any of the mixes on the last three albums, and we thought one of the best-sounding albums we’d heard in the last few years was Dr Feelgood. Bob seemed to be able to bring out the best in whatever bands he was working with”.

And he certainly did with Metallica. Decamping to One On One Recording Studios in North Hollywood, Rock insisted on the band playing together in one room instead of recording their parts individually.

“Originally, I was doing all the rhythms in the studio – the right speaker, the left speaker. It was a giant wall of guitar on every album until The Black Album,” Hetfield told Total Guitar later in 1999. “I played pretty much all of it except for solos. There was a lot of colouring, whether it was little hits or harmony guitars. Kirk would come in and do all the ripping stuff, which is out of my league.

“Before then I used to work on the rhythm with Lars without Kirk and Jason,” he continued. “That time we played as a band in the studio, and it gave us much more of a vibe. We were able to watch each other. That helped a lot, especially with some of the bass and lead stuff.”

Enter Sandman was the first song they began work on, born from a riff that Kirk Hammett brought in. “The riff that’s on the record and the way it exists today is not really the way he wrote it,” Ulrich relates on the Classic Albums documentary. Kirk’s initial idea was the first five-note refrain morphing straight into the power chord breakdown. But by chopping and repeating the first clean riff, and doubling it up on the bass, Sandman as we know it was born.

In 2023, the band appeared on Howard Stern's SiriusXM show and elaborated on how Hammett's 3 am riff idea morphed into the hook we know today, with some input from Lars Ulrich.

"He came up to me and said repeat the first part three times and then play the chords afterward," recalled Hammett. "So I said, 'Ok'". 

The drummer's role in songwriting for the band is often overlooked by those seeking to highlight perceived shortcomings in his drumming, but by James Hetfield's own admission, it was he and Lars who were the primary songwriters and arrangers for much of Metallica's history. It's only on recent album 72 Seasons that really began to change and the duo were more open to Hammett and current bassist Rob Trujillo's ideas. 

"Lars doesn't know how to play guitar and he will arrange stuff and he'll just say, 'Hey can't you do that thing in another key'", Hetfield told Stern – elaborating on Ulrich's role in Enter Sandman's writing. "Something that I wouldn't do, like Sandman for instance [plays Enter Sandman's arpeggiated clean part] and it changed the key. It's like, 'I wouldn't do that [usually], I can't pick that. Then it  would be a challenge, 'Ok, I can do that.' So there's a lot of pushing of each other. Same with drum stuff too."

Ah yes, we nearly forgot Mr Hetfield plays drums as well as everything else he's good at. "The main thing, thankfully with this bunch of guys, is when we go into a songwriting situation we leave our egos outside and it's not, 'It's my guitar – don't tell me what to play' or 'Oh, I'm the drummer – stay away,'" Ulrich told Stern.

"James will help out this part, help out that part –'Why don't you try on the toms'", added the Dane. "Of course! And I'll throw things back to James, 'Why don't you try a different key, why don't you down pick it or try galloping it, chugs instead of double-picking'… or whatever. There's that freedom because of trust, and when there's the trust, there's the love. Then you know there's nothing that's gonna happen by getting in everybody's stuff that's gonna affect the relationships, and that's a great thing."

Outside the band and despite initial resistance from the band to Bob Rock’s fearlessness at telling them what to do, the results swiftly had the band on-side. “We tried to expand every sound to the max,” remembered Rock. “We tried to get the guitars as big as possible, the bass as big as possible, the drums... You know, big and weighty.”

Metallica weren't initially enthused by the prospect of playing in one room. “They thought it was a lot of work,” Rock told Mix magazine, “and they didn’t understand it. This was the only way I knew how to make a record. To me, it was about capturing the feel that they wanted. I thought there was just this weight and size and heaviness in them that I never caught on their other records. 

"I’m not saying it wasn’t there," added Rock. "I think Kirk had the hardest time with it because he had to play solos for each take. But when it came time to do the solos, we listened to everything off the floor, and he got a lot of his ideas for his solos off of those.”

The producer also explained to MusicRadar in a track-by-track interview on the Black Album about how his fearless approach extended to Jason Newsted's bass approach and the prickly subject of Hetfield's lyrical themes.

“On Sandman, I asked Jason to play more like a bass player and less like a guitarist," he reflected. "Put that with the new perspective Lars had on drums and we had a song with a killer groove.

“At first, based on the music and the riff, the band and their management thought it could be the first single. Then they heard James’ lyrics and realised the song was about crib death. That didn’t go over well.

“I sat down with James and talked to him about his words. I told him, ‘What you have is great, but it can be better. Does it have to be so literal?’ Not that I was thinking about the single; I just wanted him to make the song great. It was a process, him learning to say what he wanted but in a more poetic and open sort of way. He rewrote some lyrics and it was all there… the first single.”

In those days, both Hetfield and Hammett were primarily ESP men onstage, but guitars including a Telecaster, Danelectro/Coral electric sitar and Gretsch White Falcon were employed for various clean parts throughout the album. Hammett would go on to buy some iconic Gibson models later, but already had an armoury at his disposal in the early '90s. 

Hetfield used a ESP MX-220 and MX-250 with active EMG 81 (bridge) and 60 (neck) humbucker pickups. This Explorer-esque shape was later renamed the EXP but would be discontinued due to Gibson's objections. Hammett, meanwhile favoured guitars including his (since sold) ESP Custom Shop KH-2 Ouija Board, 1989 black Gibson Les Paul Custom alongside a '61 Strat for cleans and ESP Les Paul-jr style guitar with EMG pickup. 

For the Black Album sessions there was a lot of guitar track layering involved, but Hetfield returned to his old favourite 'Crunch Berries' amp that's still a mainstay to this day.  “We tried a bunch of amps, but I ended up using the same Mesa/Boogie Simulclass Mark II [C++] that I've used on the last three albums," he told Guitar World in 1991. "In Los Angeles there are a million amps you can try out, but none of them were up to snuff. 

“Bob also brought in a bunch of crappy-looking vintage amps," added Hetfield. "We gave everything a shot and ended up with the same old shit. [Laughs] I must admit, though, it was a lot of fun trying out all those little '60s and '70s amps – they really sounded unique."

But it seems there was more to Hetfield's rig for the album than he was letting on in 1991. Engineer Randy Staub elaborated to Mix that there were more elements to the signal chain than the tried and true Crunch Berries: “We ended up building this huge guitar cabinet for him,” Staub remembered. “It might have had an old Marshall head, and that would be just one part of the sound. I think his standard setup was this Mesa/Boogie head and then all these other amps were there to fill in the sonic picture. It would generally have a scooped kind of tone.

"I think we had nine or 11 cabinets, Staub added. "Some stacked on top of each other, some on the floor, some baffled off from each other – and then we’d get this huge tent around this pile of cabinets curtained because as we were getting James’ guitar sound, he kept saying, ‘I want it to have more crunch!’”

Hammett's rig was a pricier affair. "I used a [Bob] Bradshaw preamp for the lows and mids, and a couple of Marshalls for the nice clean highs," he told Guitar World. "We EQ'ed it through the board a little bit, and it worked out great."

Neither is a sound the band can simply recreate live – which is perhaps one reason they've leaned into the use of the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx for Mesa and Diezel-inspired models in more recent years.

My live sound does not work in the studio, which is a completely different animal," Hetfield told Guitar World in 1991. "Every little thing is detrimental to the sound. And if someone moves a mic, you've lost it. It's pretty much a case of ‘lock the door and set up a police line.’”

James Hetfield has revealed that he and Lars Ulrich were bored on Zoom when he came up with the riff to Inamorata, the 11-minute epic that closes out Metallica’s new album, 72 Seasons, and the longest song the band has ever recorded.

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in the vast expanse of the Johan Cruijff Arena, Amsterdam, AFC Ajax’s home stadium, Metallica were discussing the size and scope of their M72 Tour, the origins of the Snake Pit, and the connection with fans when Lowe asked them about the riff. 

Just where does something like that come from? 

As it turns out, Hetfield is not so sure, but it’s certainly Black Sabbath-inspired. Sometimes it just comes out the electric guitar, an element of Iommi-by-osmosis to writing riffs like that. But where it actually came from was a Zoom call with Ulrich, and like most Zoom calls, the general vibe was tedium.

“Written on Zoom, by the way,” said Hetfield. “Lars and I sitting there, fiddling around, trying to connect over Zoom and write. The Pandora’s box was opened at that point. We’re bored, let’s do some stuff. And that was one of the riffs that came out of that session.”

The boredom soon disappeared when they knew they were onto something. Ulrich, who has been Hetfield’s most-trusted songwriting partner and arranger since Metallica started, knew there was something in it. The raw materials were there. Quite how it would end up they weren’t sure but it was the type of riff that invited further investigation.

“It was special from the first moment,” said Ulrich. “It was special. It obviously didn’t start off as an 11-minute song but it wanted to keep going, and there was a feeling as the ideas continued to show up that the song was calling out for, ‘now we’ve got to take these detours and now we’ve got to go here, this bass breakdown…’ 

“I hear all the riffs, and these guys have to let me sort of cherry-pick the ones that will turn into songs, and from the first time I heard that, I thought, ‘That sits somewhere else.’”

The Black Sabbath influence is undeniable. When asked about Inamorata, co-producer Greg Fidelman, who was there throughout the sessions for 72 Seasons, had a different recollection of how that riff came together, telling Total Guitar that was a riff from the tuning room, a pre-show idea that was written in C#.

“Yeah, I think Inamorata is in C# or some very bizarre key,” said Fidelman. “I don’t know why James was in C# when he was coming up with it. When we started working on it we said: ‘This is a weird key. Maybe should try this in A or in E?’ But for some reason that’s just not as cool. You’d think, ‘Let’s put it lower, it’ll sound even heavier.’ But it was the opposite. 

“When we tried it in more common keys, everyone was like, ‘Now I don’t like it so much!’ So we embraced that challenge of writing a heavy song in C#. You don’t really have a lot of open strings as an option in that key, so it was to come up with some ideas that we may not have otherwise come up with.”

Writing riffs in C#, one of Tony Iommi’s favourite tunings, is invariably going to invite comparisons with Black Sabbath, and it might well put you in that headspace, too. But Hetfield says all of this is unconscious, telling Lowe that he has know idea where they come from – and nor does he want to find out.

“I don’t think about it, man,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool. Thank you, Tony Iommi. Or whoever I just channelled. Or Cliff [Burton], whoever it is, thank you. Or thank you guitar for spitting that one out.’ It just happens. I can’t explain it, and I don’t want to know. I am a messenger, a vessel of riffs, and Lars has the spectacular ear of, ‘What was that!? Play it back.’”

72 Seasons is out now via Rhino/Blackened Recordings. Hetfield, Ulrich and company’s next stage of the M72 World Tour takes place on 17 May at Stade de France, a two-night stint that sees them return two days later. 

As per their self-imposed rules for this epic run, they will play two entirely different setlists on each of the nights. See Metallica for full dates and ticket details and check out the full Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe above.

Inamorata might have started out on that Zoom call with Ulrich but earlier this week Hetfield spoke of Metallica’s new creative era when he sat down with the band’s So What! fanzine for a candid interview about the songwriting process and how he wanted to involve Kirk Hammett more. 

“I was much more ready to open my heart to everyone in the band: lyrically, emotionally, and creatively,” he said. “I was really an advocate, going out of my way to say, 'Send in your riffs. We need stuff, c’mon,' you know?”

Mention Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, and you won’t have to wait long before the detractors arrive. Whether it’s regarding his knack for providing barely-filtered opinions, doubts about his ability behind the kit or jibes about that snare drum sound, Lars has taken Ringo-level flak over the years.

So, when the drummer and his bandmates joined shock-jock Howard Stern for an interview promoting new album, 72 Seasons, you might have expected Lars’ playing to come under fire once again. 

Instead, Stern took the opportunity to ask Lars about his foot technique, specifically the famous semi-quaver triplet bass drum part from Metallica’s One.

Stern highlights the fact that Lars plays heel-up, prompting Lars to launch into the famous double bass drum part. Hetfield, Hammett and Trujillo join in almost immediately before Stern requests that Lars play it on his own, potentially lighting the touch paper for some Lars-bashing.

Without hesitation, armed (or rather, footed) with two Tama Speed Cobra pedals Lars takes the opportunity to demonstrate not only his pedal technique, but one of his most famous double bass drum parts - one that is a staple beat for metal drummers wanting to learn to use a double pedal.

“I stomp on the kick drum…so I play kind of with the front of my foot.” says Lars, as Stern notes that it’s like “you’re running”. 

“It comes from the athletic side of my family,” Lars says of the heel-up technique, commonly-used in rock and metal where more power is required. “Everybody in my family were tennis players or soccer players.”

Stern goes on to ask Lars about the physical aspects of drumming and whether playing double bass drums makes his ankles ache. “No, the worst parts [after live shows] are generally the shoulder and the elbows. They’re the problem areas for me. The feet are not so bad. [The faster tempos] actually flow fairly easy for me.”

When prompted to name the most difficult Metallica song to play on drums, Lars explains that he finds the band’s earlier material more challenging because of the mental aspects rather than the physical parts.

“The ones that are the hardest are the ones where you have to play with your mind. You have to keep thinking about the next part. A lot of the stuff from the earlier, more progressive albums where it’s 5 and then it’s 3, and then there’s a thing coming up with two guys, and you’ve gotta remember that the first time it’s a single tail, then a double tail.” Using the double-time section of One as an example. 

“That’s in the head, that’s not in the body, and that’s the harder stuff for me. There are some of those crazy songs from back in the day - The Frayed Ends of Sanity, Eye of the Beholder and The Shortest Straw. Some of those songs we’ve kind of edited along the way to make them a little less heady and a little more physical…"

The interview comes after Lars recently opened up about the level of scrutiny his drumming comes under online, revealing to Metal Hammer that he does read comments about himself. “If you decide to go down into the comment sections, at least for me, you have to prepare yourself for not taking any of it overly personally,”

"You have to kind of remove yourself from it. But I’d like to challenge anybody in a band to say they don’t look at comments." adding, "I mean, I’m not sitting up until four o’clock in the morning scrolling through every one. But when you haven’t put any music out in five or six years and you dump something like Lux Æterna on an unsuspecting world, you’re going to want to see what the feedback is.”

Metallica: 72 Seasons is out now, and the band has a hefty world tour booked throughout 2023. For a full list of dates, click here.

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine has made the extraordinary claim that it was Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich who was responsible for writing the opening riff to Master Of Puppets. 

The song, which has enjoyed a summer in the limelight thanks to its inclusion in the Stranger Things Season Four finale, is one of the cornerstones of the Metallica setlist, a blockbuster epic and showcase of James Hetfield’s bona-fides as the greatest rhythm players in metal guitar. This Mustaine does not dispute.

But while discussing the contentious issues surrounding the songs he wrote while he was a member of Metallica between 1982 and ’83, which is one of the reasons why Metallica’s No Life ’Til Leather demos never saw a deluxe reissue, Mustaine tells Songfacts that he was in the room when the riff that opens Master Of Puppets was written, and it came from the drummer whom he considers a “great arranger”, if not a great drummer.

“I would love to work with James. I’d like to work with Lars again, too, but I think the real talent in Metallica has always been around the guitar – everybody makes fun of the drums,” Mustaine said. “Lars is a really great song arranger. And believe it or not, I watched him on a piece-of-shit acoustic guitar write the opening riff to Ride The Lightning.

“You know what that was? It was a guy with a guitar that doesn’t know how to play, and he’s going [mimics playing a chromatic run] on the neck. It wasn’t anything really mind-blowing by any means. The way James played it made it mind-blowing.”

• Learn to play the guitar riff to Metallica's classic Master Of Puppets
• Learn 4 surprising Metallica guitar chords from their classic songs

Asked if he realised that what he was humming was Master Of Puppets, not Ride The Lightning, Mustaine protested that he didn’t know the song-titles.

“Yeah, whatever that is. I don't fuckin’ know their song names,” he said. “I don’t listen to them. I totally respect them, I just don’t listen to them. It’s not out of me not liking them. When they come on the radio in my car, a long time ago I would change the channel, but I don’t anymore. It’s just music, and I’ve been able to put all that stuff behind.” 

It is a remarkable bit of history, and Songfacts posted the audio on its Soundcloud for clarity.

That stuff, presumably, is Metallica, and the time he spent there, then being fired, which invariably comes up in every Mustaine interview – often prompted, often not. 

Unquestionably, that is one of metal’s most legendary beefs, recent years have seen relations thaw, and in the same interview, Mustaine reminisced fondly about busting someone’s leg after they went for Ulrich, and getting in between Hetfield and a would-be assailant.

The Big Four tours that mustered Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax under the one banner in 2011 are something that he would like to see happen again, if only to pass the baton onto anotherBig Four. He urged Metallica to “step up” and make it happen, and for Slayer to reunite for the occasion. 

• 5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Megadeth

“I really think it's time for the guys in Metallica to step up, and us do one last round, see if we can get Slayer to come out of retirement and do a ‘Big Four passing of the torch’ to the new Big Four,” Mustaine said. “It would remain to be seen who they are, but I have a feeling it would include some of the players we already mentioned [Arch Enemy, Lamb of God, Trivium].

“I think it would be really cool symbolically if we did something at like, the LA Coliseum, even if it's one show and that’s it. Slayer is from Los Angeles, so it would probably make it more convenient for them to go home at night.” 

Don’t count on it happening, however. Gary Holt and Kerry King have both came out publicly to say Slayer were too soon to call it a day, but there has been no suggestion that there would be a reunion, and besides, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth are all in business. With the former two are working on new records, Megadeth touring The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!, there is no need to be passing torches.

“I personally have been hoping for this for a while, and I keep asking and asking and asking,” said Mustaine. “They’re just not into it. But that’s up to them.”