Metallica Seek, Destroy the Hamptons at Smallest Show in a Decade

Look, it’s not as if Metallica in the year of the Lord 2025 is anything remotely like these lovable 20-year-old miscreants that terrorized the Bay Area and beyond. They’re all in their sixties now, kinder, gentler, and presumably insanely loaded rock gods who you could see being the quirky, out-of-place neighbor at some comically rich enclave like the Hamptons. Wikipedia really buries the lede here, calling the 50-ish-mile stretch of Long Island “a popular seaside resort and one of the historical summer colonies of the northeastern United States.” Sure, that’s technically true in the same way that LeBron James is a “popular basketball player good at scoring points.” But the ostentatious markers of wealth found in many areas here — Move Over, $100 Lobster Salad. In the Hamptons, These Melons Cost $400 — have ventured into parodic territories Christopher Guest couldn’t even envision.

So, as the group takes the stage in a giant tent behind the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett Thursday night, it’s hard not to envision an alternate universe in which the thrash pioneers who once kicked holes in hotel walls now summer here alongside famed residents Billy Joel, Jay-Z, and Paul McCartney (the latter rocking out tonight at the side of the stage). In this mythical world, there’s Lars sipping a Wolffer Estate Chardonnay at the Hampton Classic Horse Show. There’s Robert down the street from Talkhouse downing something called a “Heavy Metal Detox Smoothie” at the local healthy eatery (with barley grass juice powder, organic Atlantic dulse, and spirulina powder, the same stuff I presume that fueled Exodus and Venom). There’s Kirk browsing Modern Luxury Hamptons magazine en route to the Olsen twins’ clothing store. And there’s James walking across the street to bucolic Amagansett Square, where he can buy goat milk ghee ($19.95 a jar), organic white truffle acacia honey ($18.95 a jar), and whatever the fuck mushroom mocha milk is ($34.95 a bag) at a nearby grocery store. And the 500-capacity makeshift stage — the smallest show the band has played in nearly a decade — is right in their backyard.

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You’d have to go back to either 2016 or literally Antarctica to see the band in a venue this small. They’re here to celebrate “Maximum Metallica,” a new 24-hour music channel revolving around the band premiering Friday on SiriusXM. (The company has hosted Coldplay, Dave Matthews, Ed Sheeran, and Mumford & Sons here in past years. Big Heavy Metal Detox Smoothie energy, all of them.) “The location of this show is not the typical Metallica concert venue,” the band’s website helpfully notes.

This is jarringly accurate. In front of me, the diehard fans who travel around the world to see as many shows as possible post up near the rail. To my left, Howard and Beth Ostrosky Stern say hello to Michael J. Fox while Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and wrestler Chris Jericho hang nearby. (Colin Jost, Sylvester Stallone, and Andy Cohen all float around separately, though I want to picture them together trading their favorite Cliff ‘Em All moments.)

To my right, (now former) SNL vet Heidi Gardner unassumingly takes in the show, while behind me, three women in cocktail dresses who were either Hamptons socialites or Real Housewives cosplay mill about since this is the “show of the season.” This is not including the appearance of Topper Mortimer, the ex-husband of an actual Housewife, but let’s get to the show itself already.

So yeah, not your typical venue in the least. But over 95 minutes, the band balance the surrealness by sticking to the classics – nine of the 13 songs are the most-played ever – with “Whiskey in the Jar” the only sorta kinda deep cut. This is not a complaint, as the band seem reinvigorated at playing a show this small. “This reminds us of the club days,” singer James Hetfield says to thunderous roars before launching into the Reload single “Fuel.” “Getting hot and sweaty and up close and personal.”

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“At our age, we didn’t get to see them play club shows,” superfan Austin Manning tells Rolling Stone before the gig, standing alongside dozens of fans who arrived as early as six in the morning to congregate and take in the scene. “We didn’t get to see them with [bassist] Cliff [Burton, who died in 1986]. Our experience has been festivals, arena shows, and stadiums. This is the closest to an old-school club gig I’ll ever get.” Manning arrived Wednesday night just in time to run into Hetfield at a restaurant down the street from the venue, where he says the singer acknowledged the surreal gig with a “It’s nice to see a familiar face around here.”

But at the show, Hetfield will mostly let the music do the talking, save for a charming “We’re gonna get loud tonight. The neighbors are gonna know who’s here” before “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and a funny preamble before “Sad But True”: “I don’t think you’re gonna like this next song but we’re gonna play it anyway; it’s pretty good. It’s kinda heavy, though.”

Guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo will devote their nightly “doodle” to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” eliciting one of the biggest applauses of the night, while the final four songs — “Seek and Destroy,” “One,” “Master of Puppets,” and “Enter Sandman” — pummel the crowd just as hard as when they were released decades ago. (By the way, to the teenage fan near me who called his mom just so she could hear “Enter Sandman,” you are both great.)

And while the set may have been geared to a more casual listener, the superfans walked away happy. Camila Guerrero Diaz is known to devotees of the group as one of Metallica’s most diehard fans, having gone to around 180 shows, sporting multiple Metallica tattoos, and getting personal hellos from Lars on most shows. She works in a mine camp in south Australia in a “remote space that you can only fly in and out of.” When the band’s management invited her to the show three weeks ago, it was an easy decision. She “flew back to civilization” and took three more flights — Adelaide to Auckland to Houston to New York — to attend the show. “The last 24 hours of my life have been in the air.” She’s doing it all again Friday to go back home. (Incidentally, it wasn’t even close to the longest time she spent to see the band. That would be 63 hours on a boat to be one of the lucky few to watch them play Antarctica in 2013. “There was a putrid smell coming off the drain ‘cause everyone was vomiting on the boat,” she says. “But it was worth it.”)

So where does the band go from here? Rumors of the group’s interest in playing a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere have been swirling, though it’s unclear if that’s based more in fact or wish fulfillment. For tonight, though, the unlikely marriage between thrash pioneers and moneyed blue-bloods consummated beautifully. And maybe, just maybe, a horseshoe-moustached, hardened rocker with a booming growl will quietly leave a grocery store tomorrow to take his mushroom mocha milk back home.

Metallica Seek, Destroy the Hamptons at Smallest Show in a Decade

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