(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 12 February 2026 14:00, UK
From the minute that he started playing music, Lars Ulrich lived and breathed all things metal.
While he might be more known these days for trying and failing to recapture the same magic he did in Metallica’s prime, you can’t say that Ulrich doesn’t still have the same passion he had for music when he heard bands like Diamond Head and Angel Witch for the first time back in the 1980s. He has always been a fan of music before anything else, but that didn’t every single one of his tastiest needs to gravitate to the heaviest bands in the world.
Granted, that’s always going to be the area he’s most comfortable in. Even before heavy metal had a proper name, Ulrich was following in the footsteps of bands like Deep Purple when he was growing up in Denmark, and when he finally moved to the US, it was all about the new wave of British heavy metal for him. He lived for the kind of rush that music gave him, but it’s not like he didn’t have a more refined palette than most when he started with everyone else in Metallica.
If anything, we should thank Cliff Burton for the band moving in different directions. The bassist may have been known for being the classical wizard that would throw in some of the most complex arrangements into Metallica songs, but he also wasn’t afraid to talk about his love for everyone from Kate Bush to REM to Lynyrd Skynyrd alongside the Black Sabbath records in their collection.
Then again, that ended up being an extremely mixed blessing when the thrash titans reached the 1990s. The Black Album is still one of the finest metal albums ever made, but when they started working on their two Load albums, it’s not like everyone was in love with them changing things up. They were clearly pulling from bands like Alice in Chains when making their newer riffs, but when it came to the fashions of the day, Ulrich was far more interested in seeing what U2 were capable of.
There had been a few guitar riffs in ‘Sad But True’ that sounded suspiciously like The Edge, but the sounds of Achtung Baby were what really stood out to him. The Irish legends had already become one of the biggest bands in the world, but seeing them dismantle their sound and start going for music that created a mood was a lot more exciting for Ulrich than rehashing the same thing over and over again.
Metallica never wanted to make the same album twice, and Ulrich felt that a band like U2 was one of the few bands that had every single element that a rock juggernaut should have, saying, “They’re one of the only other bands that are still functioning after 30 years, just like we are, and I feel a lot of kinship in what they do and I just really admire and appreciate. They’re really inspiring to me. I love their music, I love their way of reinventing themselves, and I love their way of thinking big and small. And it sort of works on all levels.”
That probably explains why Ulrich can drive some people up the wall the same way that Bono can, but his ambition isn’t a bad thing, either. He wanted to see what Metallica was capable of as a group, and while it might have resulted in some records where they fell flat on their face, it was better for them to try something new than give everyone another version of ‘Master of Puppets’ on every single record.
U2 may not have the kind of bite that Metallica does, but each of them were focused on what their music would sound like in the long term. Not every decision they made was great, and there are more than a few times where both Bono and Ulrich are guilty of sniffing their own musical farts too much, but that ambition to try something new is the reason why we’re still talking about both of them today.