(Credits: Far Out / Raphael Pour-Hashemi)
Wed 11 February 2026 16:30, UK
Anyone who grew up listening to music like Dave Grohl is going to have those records to hang their hat on.
Not every one of their favourite records might have to be one of the greatest of all time, but there’s something about everyone’s first love that is impossible to replace when they put it on the turntable for the thousandth time. And while Grohl did have a love of bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, he was always sinking his teeth into something a lot heavier when he started.
He still loved those sing-along tunes that he learned when he first picked up a guitar, but the common language in DC at the time was all based around hardcore punk. Ramones had kicked down the door for what punk could sound like in the late 1970s, but with everyone from Minor Threat and Bad Brains in his backyard, Grohl was going to get a workout behind the drum kit once he joined his first band, Scream.
But it’s not like Grohl wasn’t cut out to be a great drummer. He had been learning to play ever since he started jamming along with Rush records on his bed as a kid, and given his fixation on Led Zeppelin, it’s not like he didn’t learn a thing or two by listening to John Bonham’s drum solo on ‘Moby Dick’. He was certainly cut out to be a great drummer, but hardcore wasn’t all that far away from metal, either.
It just might not have been the type of metal that was popular at the time. Scream may have had a few catchy moments throughout their catalogue, but chances are they wouldn’t have been caught dead playing with the biggest names on the Sunset Strip. Their music spat in the face of bands like Poison and Motley Crue, but it turns out that James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were just as pissed off when they started working on those early Metallica demos.
They weren’t the kind to wear lipstick and put on a bunch of spandex whenever they performed, and once Kill Em All came out, the rest of the metal underground started to gain some traction. The record isn’t necessarily the heaviest metal offering by any stretch, but compared to what the LA scene was doing, this was the equivalent of combining Motorhead, Ramones and Venom all under one roof, complete with some of the greatest riffs that Hetfield could have made on ‘Seek and Destroy’.
Grohl was still firmly in punk territory, but even he had to admit to wearing the grooves off of his first copy of Kill Em All, saying, “Kill ‘Em All blew my f–king mind. I will be a diehard Metallica fan until the day I die because of that experience. It was like someone had sent me the Holy Grail. I was like, ‘Ahhh! This is so killer!’ So when I heard they were releasing their first demo I thought, ‘Kick ass! And it’s on a cassette, too!’ That’s going to be a lot of fun.”
And when it comes to thrash metal’s roots, there’s really no arguing with this record, either. Everything that the genre stood for could be summed up in tunes like ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Hit the Lights’, and while the lyrics weren’t necessarily the most thoughtful lines in the world, there were pieces that hinted at where they’d be going next, like the different sections in ‘The Four Horsemen’ or Cliff Burton turning in one of the greatest bass solos of all time on ‘Anaesthesia (Pulling Teeth’).
Grunge may have eventually made every single metal band seem uncool by comparison, but Grohl was never going to let go of those early records even during the height of Nirvana’s fame. Because if it weren’t for bands like Metallica, chances are we wouldn’t have seen what stoner rock would become later down the line when bands like Kyuss and Monster Magnet started to take over the world.