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Fri 16 October 2026 3:00, UK
Lars Ulrich didn’t want to spend his whole life playing the game of a typical rock and roll star.
Metallica were meant to be the kind of band that didn’t take shit from anybody, least of all their critics, and if they were asked to go in one direction, they were going to go the complete opposite way from what everyone else expected. The whole point of their music was to follow their own bliss, but it’s not like they were ever going to run away from songs that had the potential to turn into something greater than themselves whenever they walked into the studio.
But the first few years of their career painted them as a band that was always uncomfortable with the studio. They knew how to get the kinds of sounds that they wanted whenever they made some of their records, but Ulrich felt that there was a point in which things started getting too stiff. He was never one to play with the same kind of groove all the time, but And Justice For All was the one point where they had completely hit a wall.
It had become less about making great songs and more about cramming every single riff they had into one record. And when you’re a drummer of Ulrich’s calibre, half of the time spent in the studio meant punching in the right tunes and making sure that nothing was messed up when you got down a take. So when you have little to no groove on the record, it only makes sense to bring in someone like Bob Rock.
He was the kind of producer who knew how to make the biggest records possible, and while Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi weren’t the kinds of names Metallica wanted to be associated with, Ulrich at least figured it was time for a change. They would have been typecast if they made And Justice For All all over again, and when Kirk Hammett first came out with the riff for ‘Enter Sandman’, Ulrich knew that they had the beginnings of a hit.
They had to restructure the riff a little bit to make it sound a lot more punchy, but even if they only had that one riff running throughout the whole song, that was all that mattered. It took some convincing on everyone else’s part, but Ulrich knew that they had hit upon gold when he first heard the song coming out of the speakers for the first time.
There can often be a fine line between genius and any other ordinary riff, but Ulrich felt that the band couldn’t have done a better job on the song if they had tried, saying, “It’s so hard to just write short and sweet. But we nailed that one on the head because at that time it was completely instinctive. There was just something about that moment, and you can never recreate that sense of having the slate completely clean or that sense of 100% instinct or just being completely devoid of thought or any sort of contrived idea of what you’re creating.”
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Then again, getting the song out as a single was the real battle. Although Rock was pushing so hard for ‘Holier Than Thou’ to be the first thing people heard from the record, Ulrich was willing to overrule anyone and everyone to get what he wanted. And given how much money the band made off of that one tune alone, chances are Ulrich either knew it would be massive or was blessed by the musical gods with that kind of foresight.
Because even though that brand of heavy metal wasn’t big on the radio at the time, that didn’t seem to matter at all. What mattered was being able to make a great riff work, and it turned out that was all that anyone needed to hear when Metallica kicked off the next phase of their career as metal’s greatest promoters.
