The merch preceded them. Forty-eight hours before Metallica performed in Las Vegas, restaurants and bars along the Strip were crammed full of pilgrims dressed in branded gear: T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts, sneakers, tank tops, hats, beanies, socks, wristwatches. The most grizzled devotees wore fraying denim vests decorated with several decades’ worth of patches. Metallica’s licensing team estimates that about a hundred and twenty million Metallica T-shirts have been sold since 1995. The motifs are iconic. There’s the one where a hand clutching a dagger emerges from a toilet, alongside the phrase “Metal Up Your Ass.” There’s the one where a skull is wearing scrubs and performing brain surgery with a fork, a knife, and its fangs. There’s the one where the skull has a fistful of stumpy straws and is announcing, “This shortest straw has been pulled for you!” You get the idea.
Metallica is now in its forty-first year. The band was a progenitor, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, of thrash, a subgenre of heavy metal marked by thick, suffocating riffs, played with astonishing speed. Lyrical themes include death, despair, power, grief, and wrath. Though metal is often dismissed as underground music—frantic, savage, niche—Metallica has sold some hundred and twenty-five million records to date, putting the band on par, commercially, with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z. It is the only musical group to have performed on all seven continents in a single calendar year. (In 2013, Metallica played a ten-song set in Antarctica for a group of research scientists and contest winners; because of the fragile ice formations, the band’s amplifiers were placed in isolation cabinets, and the concert was broadcast through headphones.) Since 1990, every Metallica album has débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
In 2009, Metallica was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A speech was given by Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who described the band’s music as “this beautiful, violent thing that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life,” and called its motivation pure. “This is outsider music, and for it to do what it has done is truly mind-blowing,” he said. Metallica is the only metal group to have had its music added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Kim Kardashian has been photographed in a Metallica shirt on at least two occasions. Beavis sported one for the entire nine-season run of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” Though the band has made adjustments to its sound through the years—some minor, some seismic, all irritating to certain subsets of its fan base—it’s hard to think of another act that has outlasted the whims of the culture with such vigor. The band recently finished writing and recording its eleventh record, which will be released next year. “Metallica are the Marines of metal,” Scott Ian, a founder of Anthrax, told me recently. “First one in, last one out.”
Metallica’s current lineup includes the singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and the drummer Lars Ulrich, both of whom co-founded the band; the lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who joined in 1983; and the bassist Robert Trujillo, a member since 2003. Hetfield—fifty-nine, tall, graying at the temples—moves with the confident saunter of a well-armed cowboy. Ulrich, fifty-eight, radiates so much kinetic energy that it’s hard to imagine him yawning. Hammett, fifty-nine, and Trujillo, fifty-eight, are the band’s gentle, long-haired surfers, jazz enthusiasts disinclined to dramatics. If Hetfield is Metallica’s heart—its musical center and primary lyricist—Ulrich is its brain, a visionary who instinctively understands cultural terrain.
The night before the Vegas show, the band gathered at Allegiant Stadium for sound check. A scrum of about a dozen people, mostly from Metallica’s touring crew, stood on the floor to watch. (The band’s full road team has at least a hundred members.) Derek Carr, the quarterback for the Las Vegas Raiders, appeared, looking as though he were resisting an intense urge to play air guitar. Some clients of the private-plane company NetJets sat in the stands, enjoying specialty cocktails and cheering. The band periodically gathered around Ulrich’s drum kit. “Is there anything anyone wants to run?” Ulrich asked. But everyone knew what to do. At one point, Trujillo glanced out at the vacant seats and dad-joked, “I thought we were playing a sold-out show.” Even in a mostly empty stadium, the band sounded powerful, lucid, heavy.
The next afternoon, a pre-show event was scheduled for the House of Blues, somewhere in the belly of the Mandalay Bay casino. I sent a series of increasingly disoriented texts to a friend—“I’m in the casino, where are you?” “I’m in the casino?”—before we found each other. We were both wearing vintage T-shirts featuring the cemetery-themed art from “Master of Puppets,” the band’s third album.
At the bar, we lined up for plastic cups of the band’s own Blackened whiskey, a bourbon-rye blend that’s finished in brandy casks while Metallica songs blare from large speakers. A product description credits the music with enhancing the spirit’s flavor: “The whiskey is pummeled by low-hertz soundwaves which force the whiskey deeper into the wood of the barrel, where it picks up additional wood flavor characteristics.” It tasted nice. You could feel an anticipatory flutter in the air. COVID-19 had grounded Metallica for long stretches of 2020 and 2021. (My backstage pass featured a skull with a wispy Mohawk self-administering a COVID test—the results, of course, were positive.) Fans were slapping one another on the back, hooting about how much they had missed this. The feeling was: Let’s pop off. People were ready to have a good-ass time—to drink too many beers, to forget their earplugs, to buy a new Metallica T-shirt with demons on it and wiggle it on over an old Metallica T-shirt with demons on it, to headbang, to contort their fingers into devil’s horns and thrust them upward, to go “Ahhh!” when the pyro shot off, to shriek “Searching . . . seek and destroy!” along with fifty thousand other wild-eyed people, to turn to a friend and mouth “Yo!” when someone was soloing. Greta Van Fleet, a young rock band from Michigan, was opening for Metallica throughout the year. “Metallica has curated their own culture, and you can see the impact that’s had when you look out into the audience,” Greta Van Fleet’s singer, Josh Kiszka, told me. “Driving to the venue, it’s Metallica everywhere. That’s part of how the band has changed the world a little bit.”
From afar, it is easy to see Metallica as an instigating force—an accelerant, turning unruly hooligans more unruly. But that idea alone can’t sustain a devoted following for decades. As we sipped our whiskey, my companion, August Thompson, a Metallica fan since his boyhood in rural New Hampshire, told me his favorite lyric, from “Escape,” a thick and charging song from “Ride the Lightning” (1984): “Life’s for my own, to live my own way.” Hetfield repeats the sentiment, with slightly different phrasing, on “Nothing Else Matters,” a song from “Metallica” (1991): “Life is ours, we live it our way.” “For people like me, who always felt out of place in a hyper-violent world, and the hyper-violence that is masculinity, there’s a lot of solace in that,” Thompson said. Metallica’s music is rooted in feelings of marginalization, and the band, despite its achievements, has found a way to maintain that point of view for more than forty years. It makes sense that people are drawn to Metallica’s music, because they’re ill at ease in a culture that relentlessly valorizes things (money, love, straight teeth) that are very easy to be born without.
That night, Metallica opened its set with “Whiplash,” from “Kill ’Em All,” its début album. On the floor, mosh pits formed; from the stands, they resembled tiny riptides, bodies circling one another, sometimes submitting to a menacing current but mostly just orbiting. If you squinted, it almost looked like an ancient folk dance—something that might happen at a Greek wedding, late, after people had been drinking. “I think the best seat in the arena is the second tier up, where you get to see the band but you also get to see all the fans,” Hetfield told me later. “Forget the band—look at the audience.”
These days, the set list is mostly old songs, and the vibe is largely benevolent. Hetfield’s voice is low and scratchy, and can shift from contemplative to feral in a single note. He is prone to ending his phrases with a tight, curled snarl. He can still transform a “Yeah!” into a vast and terrifying invocation. He can also be tender and earnest, which has recently led fans to call him Papa Het. “This song goes out to all who struggle,” Hetfield said before “Fade to Black,” a ballad about suicide. “If you think you’re the only one, it’s a lie. You can talk to your friends, talk to somebody, because you are not alone.”
The band closed its encore with “Enter Sandman,” another single from “Metallica.” Even if metal is not your bag, it’s hard to deny the menacing perfection of the song’s opening riff: an E-minor chord, a wah-wah pedal, a sense that something dark and creepy is about to happen. During the chorus, I looked over at Thompson, who had the dazed and exuberant look of someone who had been cured of a disease by an itinerant preacher. All around us, people were rapt, ecstatic, and free. “I get up there and sing, and I watch people change,” Hetfield told me.
Hetfield was born in Downey, California, in 1963. His mother, Cynthia, had two sons from a previous marriage. His father, Virgil, had fought in the Second World War and started a trucking company when he returned to California. “He did not have a great childhood,” Hetfield said of his father. “My grandfather was some crazy musician who came through town, and then off he went—imagine that,” he added, laughing. His parents were devout Christian Scientists, and had met in church, where Virgil helped lead a weekly service. But Hetfield never connected with the religion. “It felt lonely,” he said. “When my dad was up there reading from the Scriptures, he was getting tears in his eyes. It moved him. I didn’t get it. I thought something was wrong with me.” Hetfield recalled being embarrassed when he wasn’t allowed to attend health class, or receive a physical to play football. “I still carry shame about that,” he said. “How different we were to people.”
When Hetfield was thirteen, his father left. “I went off to church camp, and I came back and he was gone,” he recalled. Two years later, his mother developed cancer, but refused medical treatment on religious grounds. “We watched her wither to nothing,” he said. “She had religion around her, inside her. She had practitioners coming over. But the cancer was stronger.” Hetfield is still not entirely sure what type of cancer she had. “Probably something really curable,” he said. For a long time, Hetfield was angry that his mother had rebuffed doctors. “I thought she cared more about religion than she did her kids,” he said. “It wasn’t talked about, either—if you’re talking about it, you’re giving it power, and you want to take power away from it. So admitting that you’re sick, that’s a no-no. We just saw it happening.” Cynthia died when Hetfield was sixteen. “There was nothing solid to stand on,” he said. “I felt extremely lost.” On “The God That Failed,” an angry, punishing cut from “Metallica,” Hetfield sings about the experience: “Broken is the promise, betrayal / The healing hand held back by the deepened nail.”
Ulrich had a very different sort of childhood. He was born in Gentofte, Denmark, in 1963. His father, Torben, was both a professional tennis player and a jazz critic (the saxophonist Dexter Gordon was Ulrich’s godfather), and his family was worldly and cultured. (“We ate McDonald’s, he ate herring,” Hetfield once said of the cultural divide.) Ulrich came to the U.S. in 1979, when he was fifteen, to attend tennis camp. He ended up at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, in Bradenton, Florida. He had been a promising youth player in Denmark, but he found the strictures of American athletic training stifling. “Curfew at 9 P.M., ten o’clock lights out, four to a bunk room, and then wake up and eat cornflakes and start hitting forehands down the line for four hours, and then backhands crosscourt for the next four hours,” he said. “That was just too stringent and disciplined for me.” When Ulrich was sixteen, his family relocated to Newport Beach, California. “In Denmark, I was at the very top end of my age group in the whole country,” he said. “When I went to qualify for the tennis team at Corona del Mar High School, I wasn’t one of the seven best tennis players at Corona del Mar High School. I don’t think I was one of the seven best tennis players on the street that I lived on.” Ulrich switched his focus to music. He was captivated by what was then called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal—bands that mixed the fury and speed of punk rock with the density and danger of metal. “When people would go, ‘Heavy metal? You mean like Kansas and Van Halen and Styx and Journey?,’ I’d go, ‘No, like Angel Witch or Saxon or Diamond Head or the Tygers of Pan Tang,’ ” he said.
In 1981, Ulrich, seeking musicians interested in starting a band, placed a classified ad in the back of The Recycler, a free periodical that was originally known as E-Z Buy E-Z Sell. A friend of Hetfield’s answered the ad, and Hetfield tagged along. “He was painfully shy,” Ulrich said. “We instantly bonded over the fact that we were loners and outsiders, and open to a best-friend relationship. Neither of us had really found who we were yet.” Though their approaches to songwriting were different—“He looks at music as a math equation, I look at it as a flowing river,” Hetfield said—they complemented each other. “Both of us were dreamers. At our best, our relationship was completely free of competitive energy or one-up-ness,” Ulrich said. “But then when there were other people in the room it became ‘Who is leading?’ ”
Hetfield and Ulrich recruited a second guitarist, Dave Mustaine, by placing another ad in The Recycler. In 1982, Hetfield and Ulrich saw a group called Trauma perform at the Whisky a Go Go, a club on the Sunset Strip. They were awed by Cliff Burton, Trauma’s twenty-year-old bass player, and began trying to persuade him to join Metallica. Scott Ian, of Anthrax, said, “There was Cliff in his flares and his Lynyrd Skynyrd pin”—an affront to the punk-indebted aesthetics of the thrash scene, which included leather jackets, hefty boots, and studded belts. Unlike the members of Metallica, Burton had some musical training. He played fingerpicked bass with the boldness and harmonic sophistication of a guitarist. “He was always doing tricky stuff that would make me think, Fuck, man, where is this guy getting this from?” Kirk Hammett said. “He was just so . . . musical.”
In order to get Burton, who was based in El Cerrito, a small city across the bay from San Francisco, Hetfield and Ulrich agreed to move there, renting an unassuming house on Carlson Boulevard and rehearsing in the garage. Mustaine moved into a unit on Burton’s grandmother’s property. Times were lean. “We’d find a tomato and some mayonnaise and make tomato sandwiches and think we were highbrow metalheads,” Mustaine recalled. Ulrich described the band’s early days as feeling immediate, uncomplicated: “There was only that moment, and ‘Where’s the beer?’ ”
In early 1983, Metallica was signed by Jonny Zazula—better known as Jonny Z.—a part-time concert promoter who sold heavy-metal records at an indoor flea market on Route 18 in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was still difficult to buy imported metal albums at mainstream record shops, and a scene of sorts had sprung up around Zazula’s booth. One weekend, Zazula asked Scott Ian if he wanted to hear “No Life ’Til Leather,” a seven-song demo that Metallica recorded before Burton joined. The songs were raw and deranged, distinguished by the band’s adolescent mania and Hetfield’s tendency to down-pick, which resulted in a thicker, heavier feel. “Holy fuck,” Ian said. “Nothing sounded like that before Metallica. Straight up. It was like electricity was coming out of the tape player. Jonny Z. said, ‘I’m bringing them to New York. We’re gonna make an album.’ I’m, like, ‘You know how to do that?’ And he goes, ‘No!’ ”
Zazula and his wife, Marsha, founded Megaforce Records after shopping the Metallica demo around and failing to get an offer. When the Zazulas started Megaforce, Jonny Z. was serving a six-month sentence in a halfway house, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (He’d been employed by a company that passed off scrap metal as tantalum, a rare element used in the manufacture of capacitors.) He spent his weekdays feeding quarters into a pay phone, attempting to book shows. “I just got caught in this passion, like there’s this little Led Zeppelin hanging out in El Cerrito, you know?” Zazula, who died earlier this year, told Mick Wall, the author of “Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica.” Zazula sent the band members fifteen hundred dollars so they could drive east in a U-Haul with their gear. In “Mustaine,” a 2010 autobiography, Mustaine remembers rolling out of bed, “bleary eyed, hungover, and smelling like bad cottage cheese,” and noticing the truck parked out front. “We stopped for beer less than a mile after pulling out of the driveway and remained in a drunken stupor for most of the trip,” he wrote.
Although Mustaine was integral to Metallica’s early sound and songwriting, Hetfield and Ulrich felt that his ferocious drinking made him a liability—no small feat in a group that would later embrace the nickname Alcoholica. Not long after Metallica arrived on the East Coast, Mustaine was handed a bus ticket back to California. “I went to the only place that I could go to—my mom’s—and started over,” Mustaine said. That year, he formed Megadeth, which has sold fifty million records to date, and which recently released its sixteenth album, “The Sick, the Dying . . . and the Dead!”
Mark Whitaker, who managed Exodus, another Bay Area metal band, suggested Kirk Hammett, Exodus’s twenty-year-old lead guitarist, to replace Mustaine. Hammett was born in San Francisco in 1962. He liked comic books and horror movies, and his mother, who was Filipino, turned him on to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Hammett wasn’t close with his father, a merchant marine. “When he drank, he was violent. When he wasn’t drunk, he was verbally abusive,” Hammett said. “I was a compulsive reader, and he would say things like ‘Kirk, he’s a bookworm, he’s not good at football,’ or whatever. I saw a lot of brutal behavior when I was a kid. Who’s the toughest? Who’s the meanest? Who’s the most dominant? Some of that rubbed off on me.”
That spring, Metallica invited Hammett to come east to audition. It was his first time outside California. “I might as well have landed on Mars,” Hammett told me. He had first encountered the band at a metal showcase in San Francisco. “James was quiet, and probably the skinniest person I’d ever seen. Lars . . . I’d never seen someone so European-looking. I was from the hood, you know? I grew up around a bunch of Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and African Americans. I didn’t see Europeans. I didn’t even see full-on white people.” The meeting was brief, and blurred by alcohol. “When I came out to New York, I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure they remembered me or what I looked like,” Hammett said. The first song he played with the band was “Seek and Destroy.” He got the job. At the time, Metallica was living in a run-down practice space in Jamaica, Queens. There was no heat, hot water, showers, or beds. “I would wrap my leather jacket into a pillow,” Hammett said.
“Kill ’Em All” was released on July 25, 1983, on Zazula’s Megaforce Records. Hetfield describes the record’s themes as “headbanging, death, and blood.” “Ride the Lightning” followed a year later. From the start, Metallica refused to capitulate, stylistically or otherwise, to anything happening around it. “They have, more than any other major modern band, consistently ignored what other groups were trying to do,” the critic Chuck Klosterman told me. The band members dressed as though they spent most of their days loitering outside a gas station. Their music was harsh, fast, and difficult. “We were always coming up against people who were telling us, ‘We can’t play you on the radio,’ or ‘You guys are too ugly,’ ” Hammett said.
For Metallica, the idea was never to seduce an audience, but to push it away. The fans who stuck around—who perhaps understood this as a kind of love—became devoted, and received devotion in return.
In 1984, Metallica left Megaforce, signed to Elektra Records, and agreed to a management deal with Q-Prime, a new firm specializing in heavy metal. Cliff Burnstein, an owner of Q-Prime, found that promoting Metallica to a general audience was nearly impossible. America was in the grip of a bizarre moral frenzy—the Satanic Panic, which linked heavy metal with demonic rituals—and the band had cultivated a reputation as dangerous. “When we had a tour, I would get in touch with radio stations along the way and try to get them to play Metallica,” Burnstein recalled. “The typical response I’d get was ‘No, you will never hear Metallica on our station.’ So then my response would be ‘I’d like to give you tickets to give away.’ And the typical response to that was ‘We will not even say the name Metallica on our station.’ ”
To some degree, trepidation was warranted. Burnstein recalled a show at the Felt Forum, a smaller theatre within Madison Square Garden. “During the first song, one person ripped a chair cushion off and flung it onstage. By the end of the song, there was not a cushion left on a chair,” he said. “Instead of getting paid, we paid Madison Square Garden for the damages.” At a particularly calamitous show at the Long Beach Arena, in California, “people were ripping fixtures out of the bathroom, people were hanging from the balcony,” Burnstein said. Hetfield and Ulrich later appeared on the radio to ask fans to stop trashing the venues.
But the Metallica experience was not designed to be friendly. Hetfield would sometimes antagonize the audience, growling, “Hey, any time this stuff gets too heavy for you . . . tough shit!” Offstage, the members of Metallica provoked one another, particularly Ulrich and Hetfield. Their complex, brotherly dynamic—Hetfield was possessive; Ulrich was demanding—sometimes threatened to overwhelm the band. “We would get drunk, and just start in,” Hammett said. “I remember once James got up and pushed Lars, and Lars literally flew across the room. We would see each other and start wrestling. We could be in a room of twenty people and we’d fixate on each other. No one else mattered.” To an extent, Metallica thrived on conflict. “Toxic masculinity has fuelled this band,” Hammett said. “I’m still sitting around saying, ‘O.K., I’m gonna write a really, really tough, kick-ass riff.’ Just look at my rhetoric there: tough, kick-ass riff. It’s an aggression that everyone feels, but it was ratcheted up in us—this weird masculine macho bullshit thing.”
In September, 1985, the band flew to Copenhagen to make its next album, “Master of Puppets.” The record spent seventy-two weeks on the Billboard 200, and became the band’s first album to go gold. Rolling Stone called it “pure apocalyptic dread.” Many still consider it the greatest thrash record of all time. “Master of Puppets” closes with “Damage, Inc.,” a sharp, flogging song that feels like being locked in a batting cage with a malfunctioning pitching machine. Lyrically, it offers both affirmation and absolution. “Fuck it all and fucking no regrets,” Hetfield screams.
In 1986, the band secured a slot opening for Ozzy Osbourne, the former vocalist for Black Sabbath, on the American leg of a solo tour. “I’ve had a special place in my heart for Metallica ever since they went on tour with me in the eighties,” Osbourne told me. “In my opinion, they took over where Sabbath left off, and they deserve everything they’ve achieved.” The run was a success. “Ninety per cent of the people in those sold-out arenas didn’t know who Metallica were, and they blew people’s brains out,” Scott Ian said.
That fall, Metallica headlined a European tour. On September 27th, the band was travelling overnight through Sweden when its bus skidded off the road. Cliff Burton, the bassist, was tossed through a window. Hetfield, Ulrich, and Hammett stood outside in their underwear, in the stark and frigid dawn, staring at Burton’s legs while they waited for a crane to lift the bus off the rest of his body. Burton was twenty-four. His death was sudden and gruesome. Anthrax had been opening for Metallica. “We sat in a room together and just drank and drank,” Ian told me. “It was really hard for them in the late eighties, going into the nineties, never really taking the time to properly grieve or process it.” He paused. “Who knew how to do that?”
Less than a month after Burton’s death, the band hired the bassist Jason Newsted, and soon it began recording its fourth album, “. . . And Justice for All,” which is famous for the single “One,” and for containing almost no audible bass. Whether that was the result of Newsted’s hewing too close to Hetfield’s rhythm guitar, or of hazing born from fresh grief, remains unclear. “When I joined the band, everybody was full alcoholic,” Newsted said. “They had lost their guide. Cliff was their teacher.”
For its fifth album, “Metallica,” in 1991—known as the Black Album because of its “Spinal Tap”-esque monochromatic cover art, which features only a coiled snake and the band’s name—the band hired the Canadian producer Bob Rock, who had previously worked on blockbuster releases by Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Mötley Crüe. The record’s themes are bleak (the single “Enter Sandman” was written about sudden infant death syndrome), but the songs are limber, catchy, and dynamic. Hammett recalled a conversation with Rock about how the band might achieve even greater fame. “The work doesn’t stop after you finish recording. Every single interview, every single appearance, every single everything—you need to do it all,” Hammett said. “That’s what Jon Bon Jovi did.”
The Black Album ultimately spent six hundred and twenty-five weeks on the Billboard charts and sold almost thirty-five million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. Five singles—“Enter Sandman,” “The Unforgiven,” “Nothing Else Matters,” “Wherever I May Roam,” and “Sad but True”—entered the Hot 100, and the band became a mainstay on MTV and modern-rock radio. “A lot of people talk down about it, or say that Metallica sold out,” Kerry King, of Slayer, told me. “Would I have wanted another ‘Damage, Inc.’? Fuck yeah. But it wasn’t on that record. And that record made them fucking superstars.”
The following year, the band co-headlined a stadium tour with Guns N’ Roses. At a show in Montreal, there was a miscommunication about pyrotechnic cues during “Fade to Black,” and Hetfield stepped directly into a twelve-foot plume of flame, suffering second- and third-degree burns on his hand and arm. After he was taken to the hospital, Guns N’ Roses waited more than two hours to go on; Axl Rose, Guns N’ Roses’ mercurial front man, then left the stage early. Riots broke out. Cars were turned over, bonfires were started, merch cases were smashed with rocks. In retrospect, Montreal was the end of something. Grunge, a righteous new subset of hard rock, made a point of rejecting the excess and dumbness of the eighties: no more women writhing across the hoods of cars, no more peacocking in skintight leather trousers. Metallica had always repudiated such extravagance—the members wore jeans and black T-shirts and worked hard—but the band was nonetheless at risk of becoming stuck on the wrong side of the cultural divide.
One potential solution was for Metallica to position itself as antithetical to Guns N’ Roses and other bands of that ilk. The 1992 documentary “A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica” features a scene in which Hetfield mocks Rose’s personal backstage rider, which included a cup of cubed ham, a rib-eye-steak dinner, a gourmet cheese tray, a fresh pepperoni pizza, Pringles, and a bottle of what Hetfield calls “Dom Perig-non.” In the video for “Nothing Else Matters,” Ulrich is briefly shown pulling darts out of a photo of Kip Winger, the suave and flashy vocalist for the metal band Winger. In 1996, Metallica released “Load,” its sixth album, which was followed, in 1997, by a companion piece, “Reload.” Both records are loose and bluesy by Metallica standards. Before the release of “Load,” all four members cut their hair short, which made certain fans apoplectic.
Hetfield now believes that “Load” and “Reload” were shaped too acutely by a desire for reinvention. “We’ve always been very organic. ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’ felt different to me,” he said. “Felt forced.” It was an unsteady time for Metallica. In 2000, the band, led by a seething Ulrich, filed a lawsuit against the file-sharing network Napster, after an unreleased version of “I Disappear,” a song recorded for the “Mission: Impossible 2” soundtrack, was leaked on the network. Ulrich insists that the lawsuit was not about money but about control. He was right to be outraged, but the technology was new, he was rich, and most of the people using Napster were college students in pajama pants. Ulrich was demonized. He was also prescient. “I take no solace in that at all,” he told me. “It was a street fight. It was ‘You’re fucking with us, we’re gonna fuck with you.’ And then it just ran amok. In retrospect, could we have done a better job of seeing that coming? Probably.”
In 2001, Newsted left the band, citing physical damage to his body and a dispute with Hetfield about a solo project. “When you’re one of the four that make the thing go round, the sacrifices that you have to make . . . it’s not for everyone, man,” Newsted said. “That’s why there’s only one band like this.” Bob Rock agreed to temporarily fill in on bass as Metallica began work on “St. Anger,” its eighth album. Three months into the sessions, Hetfield abruptly entered an intensive rehabilitation program, mostly for alcoholism, and then he dedicated himself to aftercare and family therapy. In total, Hetfield took eleven months off from Metallica. For a while, it seemed unlikely that the band would survive the hiatus. “There were six months where they were done, no question,” Rock said.
When Hetfield finally returned, there were boundaries. He would work only from noon to 4 P.M., so that he could attend meetings and spend time with his children. His bandmates chafed against the new restrictions. With some nudging from Q-Prime, Metallica had been working with Phil Towle, a performance coach who functioned more like a therapist, and kept him on the payroll until it started to seem as though he wanted to join the band. Ulrich’s father arrived from Denmark to listen to some early songs. His reaction? “I would delete that.”
Metallica also still needed to find a permanent bassist. Robert Trujillo, a former member of the thrash-punk band Suicidal Tendencies, was invited to audition. Trujillo, who was born in Santa Monica in 1964, to a Mexican mother and a Native American and Spanish father, is thoughtful and serene. He wears his bass low and his long black hair in braids. When he performs with Metallica, he often creeps across the stage, seesawing from one leg to the other, a move that fans have dubbed the “crab walk.” His bass audition took place over two days. “The first day, I was just a fly on the wall. And then at about eleven o’clock at night Lars goes, ‘Hey, do you want to go get a drink?’ We end up drinking until five in the morning,” Trujillo told me. “People ask me, ‘Was there any hazing? Were you tested in any kind of way?’ I think that might have been part of it for him. At 9 A.M. he’s on the treadmill, and I’m there with this massive hangover.” That evening, Metallica offered Trujillo a place in the band. He was still wearing one of Ulrich’s Armani T-shirts from the night before. (Early the next year, they gave him a million-dollar signing bonus.)
In what might be the most fortuitous timing in the history of documentary film, the directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky had been in place to shoot the making of “St. Anger” for a goofy promotional gimmick—a series of late-night infomercials advertising the new record. Instead, they created a full-length film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” which was released in 2004. These days, big-budget music documentaries tend to be produced or even directed by the artists themselves, and to unfold in predictable ways: a little tension, a lot of comeback. But “Some Kind of Monster” shows Metallica, a band famous for being seemingly impervious even to the death of one of its members, at its clumsiest and most vulnerable. When I first saw the movie, I was twenty-four and found the incongruity of it—some guy in a sweater asking Metallica to talk about feelings—funny; now, at forty-two, I find it unbelievably poignant.
In the end, Metallica made a record with all the defeated energy of a sinking stone. “St. Anger” is airless, and lacks magic. (It also lacks guitar solos.) “Eh, it’s honest,” Hetfield told me, shrugging. “You might not identify with it, or you don’t like the sound. But that’s where we were, and that’s what we put out. It’ll have its time, maybe.” He laughed. “Maybe not!”
Somehow, Metallica managed to survive. “It was the four of us in a room with our instruments, looking at each other and going, ‘O.K., it starts again, right now, in this moment,’ ” Hammett said. The idea of moving on, and never looking back, has long been central to the band’s ethos. Though it would be strange to talk about Metallica’s music as hopeful or optimistic—it is not—the band has been propelled, in a nearly pathological way, by a kind of anti-nostalgia, a frenetic faith in whatever comes next. “The past just fucks things up—always,” Hetfield said to Rolling Stone in 1993. Ulrich told me that he contemplates the band’s history only when he’s being interviewed, and that even then it tends to assume an uncanny, almost mythic quality.
In 2007, the band hired Rick Rubin to produce its ninth studio album, “Death Magnetic,” and Rubin proposed a thought experiment to the members: What kind of record would they make if Metallica didn’t exist? “The weight of the title ‘Metallica’ is a heavy one,” Rubin told me. “What is the music you write if nobody has heard of you before?” To an extent, every Metallica record is a concept album about death—wanting it, fearing it—but none embraces dying quite as explicitly as “Death Magnetic.” The songs are fast, complex, ornery, and surprising. There are elaborate, harmonized guitar solos, rhythm changes, and lyrics that consider the delicate membrane separating the still living from the gone forever. “Just a Bullet Away,” an outtake, sees Hetfield again imagining, in a close and intimate way, what it might feel like to kill oneself. “All reflections look the same / In the shine of the midnight revolver,” he sings, his voice shuddering. If Hetfield saw his mother’s unwillingness to receive medical treatment as an inadvertent embrace of death, rather than as an expression of faith, it would make sense for his life’s work to interrogate that impulse. “There are times when I’m so afraid of dying,” Hetfield told me. “Other times, it’s, like, I’m good,” he said. “I feel cleaned up inside.”
In September, 2019, Hetfield returned to rehab, and the band cancelled a tour of Australia and New Zealand; five months later, Metallica pulled out of two American festivals, because, as Hetfield explained in a message to fans, “I have critical recovery events on those weekends that cannot be moved.” “It wasn’t a tune-up, that’s for sure,” Hetfield said of that stint in rehab. “It was me dropping the toolbox and saying, ‘I don’t need this. I’m tired of this.’ It was too much work being on the road and trying to stay connected with home. I was not caring for myself. I know that’s kind of the theme here—me not knowing how to take care of myself.”
The hammering title track of Metallica’s tenth album, “Hardwired . . . to Self-Destruct” (2016), grapples with whether it’s possible to thwart our most damaging tendencies. “On the way to paranoia / On the crooked borderline / On the way to great destroyer / Doom design,” Hetfield barks. His response to help is sometimes aggression. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he said. “I can identify what the problem is, easy. But what’s the solution?” He paused. “I don’t know if I want to hear the solution. I kind of want to still be stuck in my shit.” Earlier this year, Hetfield filed for divorce from Francesca Tomasi, his wife of twenty-five years. Hetfield continues to cite Tomasi as crucial to his early sobriety. “She was the one that threw me out of the house to go find help. I don’t want to call it tough love, because that’s cheapening it,” he said. “It couldn’t have been easy for her to say, ‘Get out.’ That affects her life, too.”
I asked Hetfield if, in the absence of drugs and alcohol, music might also offer a useful kind of oblivion. I’ve felt it, as a fan—the edges of my consciousness get a little blurry, maybe I forget where I am. He nodded. “There are many names for it. I call it getting in the zone,” he said. “You’re not feeling shameful about past stuff, you’re not future-tripping in fear about what’s coming up next. You’re right there, and you’re doing exactly what you need to do.” He went on, “I think everyone searches for that sense of presence. I searched for it in the wrong medicines for a long time. I just wanted to turn my head off. That worked until it didn’t work. Finding a new god that isn’t alcohol . . . yeah, that’s what I’m still workin’ on.”
This past spring, the San Francisco Giants hosted Metallica Night at Oracle Park. Hetfield and Hammett were scheduled to perform an instrumental version of the national anthem on their guitars, and Hetfield would throw out the first pitch. The day before, they convened at what Metallica calls HQ—an inconspicuous, semi-industrial complex in San Rafael. It contains the band’s administrative offices, a studio, conference rooms, and a cavernous practice space decorated with hand-painted flags from around the world and other fan-made ephemera. Hetfield and Hammett ran through the anthem a few times. There was some messing around. There were some big riffs. In their hands, the anthem became burly, lawless, and tough.
The following afternoon, Hetfield warmed up outside the park with one of the band’s physical therapists. He was throwing hard. “Better to go too far than to have it bloop-bloop-bloop to the plate,” Hetfield said. Earlier, in the greenroom, he had watched a video of Mariah Carey’s infamous first pitch at the Tokyo Dome, in 2008, in which she spectacularly whiffed it wearing four-inch platform heels, big sunglasses, and short shorts. “This seems much harder to do in hot pants,” he said.
I asked Hetfield if he was more nervous about the pitch than about the anthem. “Oh, yeah,” he said. Football is more his game. Hetfield grew up rooting for the Oakland Raiders, before the team moved to Las Vegas, and he said that playing the Raiders’ new stadium in Vegas had been “a big deal.” He met the quarterback Derek Carr that night after sound check. “He’s a super-spiritual guy, and I connected right away with that,” he said. “I was a total dork, like, ‘Derek, this is gonna be weird, but can I get your phone number?’ I never ask anyone for that. We text back and forth.”
When it was time to run through the anthem, which would take place near the pitcher’s mound, a security guard—older, testy—stopped Hetfield. “I gotta scan ya,” he barked, reaching for Hetfield’s credential. “You gotta scan me?” Hetfield laughed, with the incredulity of someone who has not been stopped by a security guard in several decades. “I gotta scan ya,” the guy repeated, unmoved. On the field, players—including the outfielders Mike Yastrzemski and Joc Pederson—lined up to pay their respects. Alex Wood, a pitcher, appeared holding a Sharpie and a bottle of Blackened whiskey that he keeps in his locker.
After sound check, Hammett and I sat high in the empty stands, overlooking the bay. The sky was wide and cloudless. “This area here used to be filled with run-down warehouses and factories from the forties,” Hammett said, pointing across the water. “After school, me and my friends, still in our Catholic-school uniforms, used to prowl around down here and throw rocks. All the windows were already broken out, but we’d try to get the last shards of glass.”
Since joining Metallica, Hammett has had to find a way to survive in a band led by two alpha males. “If you’re a lead guitarist of that kind of talent, the idea that you’d be third when people are listing band members—most people could not live with that,” Burnstein, of Q-Prime, told me. “But Kirk is a pure player. He lives to play.” Hammett, who is Buddhist, will talk at length about consciousness, God, enlightenment, resonance, Nirvana. He believes that the work he does with Metallica is an extension of some sublime and omnipotent creative force. “I put myself in this space where I take in all the creativity around me and I channel it to create more,” he said. His hope is that Metallica facilitates a healing sort of fellowship. “We are so nondenominational,” he said, laughing. “Come to the Church of Metallica. You’ll become a member and rejoice! You don’t have to direct anything at us. You can direct it at the experience that you’re having.”
That evening, Hetfield and Hammett shredded their way through the anthem. Afterward, Hetfield handed off his guitar and strode toward the pitcher’s mound. The throw was good. Strong, assured, unwavering. Straight across the plate.
In July, the Netflix series “Stranger Things”—which follows a group of rangy, anxious teens as they attempt to save their home town from a spooky alternative dimension known as the Upside Down—débuted the second part of its fourth season. The show is the platform’s most watched original series. The main protagonists are devotees of Dungeons & Dragons and members of something called the Hellfire Club, which is led by a sweet metalhead named Eddie Munson. In the season finale, Munson, who preaches nonconformity as a kind of sanctifying practice, volunteers—spoiler alert!—to sacrifice himself, and does so while standing on the roof of a trailer in the Upside Down, playing the guitar solo from the song “Master of Puppets.” (The season is set in 1986.) Two weeks after the episode was released, “Master of Puppets,” which is more than eight minutes long, appeared on the Hot 100 for the first time, at No. 40. (The show gave a similar boost to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” which came out in 1985.) “Master of Puppets” entered the Top Ten on Spotify’s U.S. chart, and the Top Fifty on its global chart; soon, it had been streamed more than half a billion times.
Unsurprisingly, older Metallica fans found the attention annoying. It’s easy to forget that, in the mid-eighties, publicly identifying as a Metallica fan often meant being labelled a druggie, a weirdo, a creep; back then, a person suffered socially for an allegiance to thrash. The idea that true metal fandom requires weathering such stigma is foundational and long-standing. Yet the band was quick to embrace its new acolytes. Metallica’s members even filmed themselves wearing Hellfire Club T-shirts and jamming along to footage of Munson’s solo. In a pinned comment on its official TikTok, the band clarified its open-door policy: “FYI—EVERYONE is welcome in the Metallica Family. Whether you’ve been a fan for 40 hours or 40 years.” Well, fine. The solo was recorded for the show by Tye Trujillo, Robert Trujillo’s eighteen-year-old son. The hope was that it would sound raw and frenetic, as though a teen-ager were playing it. “I don’t think Tye fully understood how this thing was gonna blossom,” Trujillo told me. “I liked that. At our house, we don’t have a whole lot of TV going all the time. We live in Topanga Canyon, and there’s a lot of time to play music and make art and go hiking and surfing. In some ways, he’s sheltered from the energy around these kinds of things. There’s a purity there, which I love.”
In late July, Metallica headlined Lollapalooza, in Chicago—its first U.S. date since the “Stranger Things” finale aired. When the band first played the festival, in 1996, the booking angered Perry Farrell, Lollapalooza’s co-founder and the front man of the alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction. “A lot of people were pissed,” Burnstein told me. “I understand how Perry felt—like his alternative thing was being co-opted.” He added, “Of course, there was Perry last night backstage, saying hi to the guys.” These days, Lollapalooza is mostly indistinguishable from any other major American music festival. The weekend’s other headliners included the pop star Dua Lipa, the rapper J. Cole, and the pop-punk band Green Day. In the wake of “Stranger Things,” Metallica was now the most newsworthy act on the bill.
The night before the show, the band met in Grant Park to film a short skit with Joseph Quinn, the twenty-nine-year-old British actor who plays Munson. “You’re taller than on the TV,” Hetfield joked, shaking Quinn’s hand. The band took Quinn into its tuning trailer to jam. “I’ll give you a four count,” Ulrich said, drumsticks aloft. Quinn left with a signed guitar; the video was posted to the band’s social-media accounts. Afterward, the band went onstage to rehearse. It had rained earlier in the day, and the ground was slick with mud. I stood on a piece of plywood in a mostly empty field and watched Metallica warm up.
Hetfield has evolved into a magnetic front man. Early on, he said, his stage persona—cocky, aggressive, hard—was mostly aspirational. “Being up onstage is a fantasy world,” he said. “Everyone is out there sprinkling you with wonderful dust. You start to believe it, and then you get home and you go, ‘Where’s my dust?’ ” he said. “Not so wonderful now, sitting here alone with two cats, taking the garbage out.” On tour, he said, the days off are harder than the days on. There’s nowhere to funnel the energy; time turns into a strange, liminal expanse. “My body is tired, but my mind is still going. What do I do with that?” he said. “I just ask people in the crew, or friends, or my assistant, ‘Hey, can you just sit down and watch TV with me?’ ” “Moth Into Flame,” a song from “Hardwired . . . to Self Destruct,” is about the intoxication of celebrity. “I believe the addiction to fame is a real thing,” Hetfield said. “I’ve got my little recovery posse on the road to help me out. We’ll say a prayer before going onstage: ‘James, you’re a human being. You’re going to die. You’re here doing service. You’re doing the best you can.’ That is helpful for me.”
The following afternoon, the park filled with thousands of Metallica shirts, many of which looked conspicuously new. The atmosphere backstage was relaxed. I sat on a wicker couch with Robert Trujillo and drank a brand of canned water called Liquid Death. One of the group’s trailers was labelled “Yoga.” Shortly before Metallica’s set, I climbed a riser on the edge of the stage so that I could see both the band and the crowd. Festival sets can be hard—much of the audience had been bobbing in the late-July sun for nine hours by the time Metallica took the stage—but the energy was high. “Master of Puppets” has been a fixture on the band’s set list for decades, but now it’s been granted extra prominence as the final song of the encore. As Hammett began to play the solo, footage of Eddie Munson appeared on huge screens flanking the stage. The crowd went nuts. I clung to the edge of the riser. For a moment, it felt as though all of Chicago were shaking.
After Metallica’s set, Ulrich rushed off to the Metro, a rock club near Wrigley Field. His two oldest sons—Myles and Layne—play in an excellent bass-and-drums duo called Taipei Houston, and had a gig opening for the British band Idles. “That was the past, this is the future!” Ulrich joked, sprinting toward a waiting S.U.V. wearing a navy-blue bathrobe with the hood up. At the Metro, he stood in the V.I.P. balcony, glowing with pride. After the set, as Myles and Layne dutifully broke down their gear, Ulrich chatted with the club’s owner, Joe Shanahan, about the first time Metallica played the Metro, in August of 1983, opening for the metal band Raven. Ulrich was nineteen.
Later, over tea at his hotel, I asked Ulrich about the “Stranger Things” phenomenon. He leaned back, sanguine: “If you and I were sitting here twenty years ago, thirty years ago, back then it was really only about the music. Partaking in these sorts of opportunities would have been considered selling out. But the culture is so much more forgiving of these types of things now.” He continued, “When you’ve been around as long as we have, you have to kind of ebb and flow. I don’t think there were any writeups about Lollapalooza this morning that didn’t mention Eddie, didn’t mention ‘Stranger Things.’ And it’s not like ‘Eh, what the fuck, is the music not good enough?’ It’s like . . . it’s cool.”
In 2021, the band released “The Metallica Blacklist,” a collection of fifty-three covers of songs from the Black Album, in honor of the record’s thirtieth anniversary. Twelve of the fifty-three artists chose to cover “Nothing Else Matters,” which Hetfield wrote when the band was on tour in support of “. . . And Justice for All.” Elton John once compared “Nothing Else Matters” (favorably) to “Greensleeves.” It is, by my accounting, Metallica’s first song about romantic love. Hetfield can be coy about its origins—he missed his girlfriend; he found that feeling embarrassing—but it is also true that, since its initial release, “Nothing Else Matters” has come to sound less specifically romantic and more like an ode to any kind of life-sustaining devotion. It’s technically a waltz, but it feels like the last of the great power ballads: momentous, tortured, cathartic, triumphant. The Metallica community often talks about the track as a fan anthem of sorts. In moments of deep communion with the band and its music, nothing else matters. It’s an emotional song, but a terrifying one, too. “What’s heavier than love?” Scott Ian said.
This sort of vulnerability was once anathema to Metallica—“What I’ve felt, what I’ve known / Never shined through in what I’ve shown,” Hetfield sings on “The Unforgiven”—but it now feels central to the band’s mission. The singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson, a longtime supporter, praised Metallica’s humanity and good will. “I’m a huge fan of their music, but even more so of the remarkable human beings they are,” he told me. “All heart.” In conversation, I found Hetfield warm and disarmingly open. He often inquired after my baby daughter. When I mentioned that I was having a hard time sleeping in my hotel room, he reminded me that it was important to have something from home. “My daughter gave me these stones—what are they called? Crystals,” he said. “You’ve gotta bring something. A pillowcase, some lavender oil.”
One afternoon, I asked Hetfield if he felt as though he’d finally found the life and community he’d always wanted: he lives in Colorado, hunting, beekeeping, spending time outdoors; he sees friends; he tours with Metallica. He paused to consider the question. “Will I ever admit that I found it? Will I ever allow myself to be happy enough to say I found it? Maybe that’s a lifelong quest, the search for family,” he said. “When my family disintegrated, early on in life, I found it in music, I found it in the band. I remember Lars being the first one to buy a house and have friends over, and I was, like, ‘Who are these people? You didn’t invite me! You’re cheating on me with another family!’ Obviously, our fans have become a kind of worldwide family. But at the end of the day they say they love you and you kind of go, ‘O.K. . . . what does that really mean?’ ”
But they do at least love a version of you, I ventured—the version of you that exists in the work.
“Yeah, and what version is that?” Hetfield countered.
It was a naïve thought, presuming that he could cloister or delineate a self in the context of a band he has led his entire adult life. “Metallica is bigger than the individual members,” Burnstein told me. “And to some extent, in their lives, they are subservient to the idea of Metallica.” That feeling of obligation has kept the band going, by giving shape to what its members have sacrificed. “The fifth member of Metallica is the collective,” Ulrich said. “People say, ‘What does Metallica mean to you?’ It’s just a fuckin’ . . . it’s a state of mind.” He paused. “Metallica is the whole energy of the universe. We just steer it along.” ♦
