James Hetfield will never get tired of playing a 1983 Metallica classic: “That’s all that matters”
Every artist tends to have those few tracks in the setlist that are designed to waste time. Even though they might mean something special to everyone who paid for a ticket, no one can have that same fire forever, and there are usually those times when every artist can fake a smile and try to squeeze any tiny bit of emotion out of a song that they’re grown sick and tired of for years.
If you hit the nail on the head as well as Metallica did on certain tunes, it didn’t take much for someone like James Hetfield to keep things rolling.
The only problem with Metallica’s history of songs is that there aren’t enough of them to keep track of. They were never the kind of band to have various odds and ends that didn’t make it onto the track listing and would be forgotten on some demo tape. Every song was one to be counted, and that meant packing them to the brim with every note they could think of.
That intensity in their writing process came from a desire to make every track count. Metallica were never interested in filler, even in their earliest days, treating each song as an opportunity to push themselves further. It meant that their material often felt dense, packed with ideas that might have been spread across multiple tracks in the hands of another band.
At the same time, that approach created a unique challenge when it came to translating their catalogue into a live setting. With so few songs and so much ground covered within each one, setlists had to be carefully balanced, ensuring that the energy never dipped while still giving the audience a sense of the band’s range. It is a tension that has followed them throughout their career, shaping both how they write and how they perform.
Even though an album like Master of Puppets has a near-flawless track listing, there aren’t nearly enough songs for an average set, normally only sticking eight or nine songs on an album in their glory years. And once they decided to get a bit more experimental with their sound on later projects like Load, having more music didn’t exactly equate to the best music, either, usually resulting in the track listing being either too front-loaded or having too many musical detours.
Compared to that kind of bloated track listing, Kill Em All is almost a breath of fresh air. The whole album is still one of the most juvenile things the thrash icons have ever made, but listening to tracks like ‘The Four Horsemen’ and ‘Whiplash’, you can hear the musical juggernaut they would one day become once they had a few more years under their collective belts.
But despite Hetfield’s voice sounding absolutely shrill, ‘Seek and Destroy’ is still the best foundation for what Metallica were going to be. Outside of every single riff being a hook on its own, the whole song feels like a celebration of everything they are about, despite a few lyrics that have to do with killing people for pleasure.
While the band’s riffs have become far more complicated since then, Hetfield said that he still can’t get enough of the tune, saying, “Sometimes you feel like Ozzy who’s played ‘Paranoid’ for the two billionth time going ‘eurgh come on’, but playing ‘Seek and Destroy’, we played that song a lot, but it’s still fun, we find fun in it. When I see a fan loving it, singing it back, that’s all that matters, if I don’t like the song, we’re not going to play it but I like it because people react to that song and they like it.”
It also helps that the piece is one of the first major crowd-participation songs that the band played. During their mock bass auditions in Some Kind of Monster, the band used this track as the litmus test for any hopeful players, and since Hetfield is nowhere close to the high notes these days, leaving it open to the crowd is the perfect way around it.
‘Seek and Destroy’ is far from the most complicated riff Hetfield ever conceived, but it was never supposed to be. The band has become tighter since, but this still brings back the memories of kids growing up in the 1980s, when all that mattered was riffs that made them bang their heads like this.
