(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 5 April 2026 19:00, UK
When Metallica started ticking over the engine of their musical machine, they must have quickly realised what a monster they had in their hands.
Because there is nothing quite like the experience of playing your early shows as a band, watching the world respond to your brand of music, and spreading it like wildfire. For Metallica, it was a realisation that their fiery brand of heavy metal had legs and their sound could extend beyond the humble realms of America’s grass roots venues.
‘Hit The Lights’ was a perfect platform for the band. A relatively simple metal song about embracing the metal lifestyle, it was a blueprint for this burgeoning scene. The band’s fast tempos, wild instrumentals and aggressive style of playing marked them as a point of difference within the industry, and now it was time to showcase that in a live setting.
Naturally, the fury of the track presented something of a challenge for the live setting. Getting to grips with their setup, James Hetfield didn’t play rhythm guitar while singing and instead left the duties to Dave Mustaine. It was a cobbled yet promising start for the band, who continued on the road, buoyed by the relative success of their performance and the overwhelming response to their early releases.
However, like all great bands, Metallica backed up that early release with a more powerful sophomore album. They took the energetic blueprint of their debut and mixed it with the performative nous of a band who went on tour, and suddenly, they were the next in line to seize the rock and roll throne.
“Touring definitely made us a little more worldly,” Hetfield remembered, “We started to see other things that were going on in the world. And that’s when more of the punk-oriented, opinionated kind of thoughts began to appear in our lyrics. And actually having to sit down and write an album made a difference, because Kill ’Em All was just songs we had been playing in clubs for the two years before we recorded it. Ride The Lightning was a real huge step for us. ‘Creeping Death’ was our first big, chanting, gang-vocal thing. There was almost some production value to it!”
Ride The Lightning saw the band understand music beyond the simple labels of thrasher and heavy metal. Camping out in Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen with Flemming Rasmussen, the band brought acoustic guitars into the mix as well as experimental instrumental sections best seen on ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ and ‘Trapped Under Ice’.
But the most distinct difference was the lyrics, informed by the new world-weary outlook of James Hetfield. Everything from the threat of nuclear war in an American society living under the cloud of the Cold War to the first-person perspective of someone trapped on death row, lost in the corruption of the criminal justice system.
Hetfield had taken this scrappy DIY band and turned them outwards, building the foundations of a band who would later become one of the biggest in the world, selling out arena tours for decades to come.
