(Credits: Epiphone)
Fri 9 January 2026 23:00, UK
In 2022’s The Menu, Ralph Fiennes plays a Michelin-star chef who’s pushed to murderous extremes by his infuriating interactions with elitist billionaires, when all he really wanted, it turned out, was to set aside his fancy training and just make a nice, basic cheeseburger, and I have a feeling Kirk Hammett might relate to this.
I’m not saying the longtime Metallica guitarist has a secret desire to murder his wealthy fans, for they’re the only ones who can afford to come to his concerts, but it seems a safe assumption, though, that after more than 40 years of stadium gigs and awards shows, inner-band squabbles and angry fan backlash, Hammett sometimes daydreams about those simpler days back in the early ‘80s, when he was a wide-eyed kid from El Sobrante, California, playing in an upstart metal band with everything to prove.
“It’s like a fairy tale come true,” a 21-year-old Hammett told his hometown paper, The Oakland Tribune, back in 1985, when Metallica were touring Ride the Lightning and building their international audience, gushing, “It’s hard to believe it all.”
Flashing forward three decades to 2015, Hammett was then a middle-aged man with essentially nothing left to prove; Metallica had evolved from a dangerous thrash metal act into the biggest mainstream rock band in the world, having become Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-ers, revered ambassadors of their trade, and multi-platinum commercial monsters.
But when Hammett took part in a survey that year by Guitar World magazine, asking various artists to choose a song that they’d most like to be remembered for, he didn’t go with any of the obvious, titanic mega-hits from his band’s catalogue, not ‘Master of Puppets‘, not ‘One’, not ‘Enter Sandman’, not even any of the big ballads like ‘The Unforgiven’ or ‘Nothing Else Matters’. Instead, he went all the way back to the beginning, naming ‘Motorbreath’ from Metallica’s 1983 debut album Kill ’Em All as the song he’d most like people to associate with him when he’s dead and gone.
“I chose it because it has the breakneck tempo we were so fond of in our early days—plus the lyrics set the tone for our lives over the next ten years,” Hammett said, “And unlike the songs we wrote later, ‘Motorbreath’ is under four minutes long!”
Diehard fans might not be that surprised by this selection, considering ‘Motorbreath’ has continued to pop up on Metallica setlists well into their later years, but the song wasn’t a single on Kill ‘Em All, and it’s not exactly front-of-mind as a trademark track even for fans who prefer the band’s more visceral 1980s material. The song, which was written by James Hetfield and includes the late Cliff Burton on bass, is something of a blunt instrument: just three minutes and seven seconds of relentless attack-mode, with riffage that owes as much to Motörhead (hence the title) and hardcore punk as traditional heavy metal. But that may be precisely the point, as ‘Motorbreath’ captures the band and Hammett before the mythology hardened, and before Metallica became an institution.
Hetfield actually wrote the track when he was still with his previous band, Leather Charm, although an embittered Dave Mustaine also later took credit for writing the song’s intro. When Hammett arrived in 1983 after Mustaine’s ousting from Metallica, however, he helped shape the track into what it became. His playing throughout Kill ’Em All is less about finesse and more about propulsion, locking in with drummer Lars Ulrich to push the music forward and create a form of speed metal that didn’t have to compromise on quality tunes, and ‘Motorbreath’ embodies that effort, requiring none of the production bloat that sometimes over-complicates even the best songs from Metallica’s mainstream era.
It’s Kirk Hammett’s simple, delicious cheeseburger, and who could blame him for wanting to be remembered for that?
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