(Credits: Far Out / Kreepin Deth)
Thu 8 January 2026 4:00, UK
Even though they were considerably late to the party in terms of the dawn of heavy metal, Metallica are by no means a lesser entity in the history of the genre, and continue to be one of the most formidable forces in the sphere this day.
Having helped to bring a new subgenre into the world in thrash metal in the early 1980s, they’re considered to be part of the ‘Big Four’ alongside Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, all of whom were consistently pushing each other to make metal into something far more extreme and boundary-pushing than it had been in its earliest form.
However, that doesn’t mean that they were trying to distance themselves from the genre’s origins, and with metal having been around in some form since the early 1970s, they had a decade’s worth of inspiration to tap into when it came to forming their own identity as a group.
In their early years, it was clear that they still owed a lot to the metal acts who originally came from the UK, such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, and later into the decade, the likes of Iron Maiden and Saxon were equally as important to the direction they would move in.
Most important, however, were Motörhead, who played in a far more aggressive and punk-adjacent fashion compared to their contemporaries, and the similarity between this and the thrash metal sound that Metallica adopted for themselves at the start of the following decade was considerably more like the venomous attitude that Motörhead exuded on their earliest records.
There was an edge to Motörhead that few other metal acts exhibited, and Metallica frontman and guitarist James Hetfield has always considered them to be a major part of the foundation for his own band’s existence.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, shortly after the death of Motörhead frontman and bassist Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, he explained just how much they’d rubbed off on him and the rest of the band in terms of helping them to find their own identity.
“Motörhead had a lot to do with Metallica sitting here right now,” Hetfield explained, reflecting on their influence. However, he continued by praising them not just for their musical achievements, but for how much of a role model Lemmy was for burgeoning acts in the punk and metal world. “But just Lemmy as an entity, as kind of a father figure, he helped us a lot. He was unafraid. And he was a character. And he was himself. And we all respected that so much. He did his own thing to the last breath. No matter who you are, how could you not be inspired by that?”
There are few metal icons like Lemmy, and for Hetfield to acknowledge him only goes to show just how great of an influence they had on the future mutations of metal. To know that, despite the intensity and ferocious nature of their music that Lemmy was always there to offer his support to artists who he saw potential in and wanted to see grow shows how significant he was to the genre, and how much he is missed by those who received his blessing in the past.
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