The most hotly disputed Metallica song: Who wrote ‘Leper Messiah’?
A song about a false prophet controlling his followers and making a profit in the process, Metallica’s ‘Leper Messiah’ unfortunately feels as much at home in 2026 as it did upon its original release 40 years ago, but as controversial as the preacher depicted in the lyrics is, the credit-related drama that has dogged the track for decades.
Guitarist Dave Mustaine joined the gang in 1981 after responding to an ad placed by drummer Lars Ulrich in a local newspaper, and despite helping to develop the crunching sound of the group and propel them through the metal circuit, his time as a gigging musician prior to Metallica had left him with a few bad habits.
The press often dubbed the band ‘Alcoholica’ due to their heavy drinking on the road, but Brian Slagel, owner of their first label, Metal Blade Records, said Mustaine’s behaviour was extreme, even by the band’s standards: “Dave was an incredibly talented guy, but he also had an incredibly large problem with alcohol and drugs. He’d get wasted and become a real crazy person, a raging megalomaniac, and the other guys just couldn’t deal with that after a while.”
The band famously dropped him at New York’s Port Authority bus terminal and bid him farewell, leaving him to spend the four-day ride back to San Francisco plotting his villain origin story and hatching the blueprint for what would blossom into Megadeth. He was left with only a tape of his riffs to show for his time with the band, along with a single plea he allegedly made to the group: “Don’t use my riffs”.
It’s this moment that sparked one of metal’s most enduring rivalries: Metallica vs Megadeth, which has rumbled on for decades like the heavy metal equivalent of Blur vs Oasis. At the heart of it are two issues: first, the firing of Mustaine, and second, that Metallica used songs Mustaine co-wrote, despite his standing plea for them not to do so.
Anyone even remotely familiar with Mustaine knows the Megadeth leader has never been shy about his early contributions to Metallica, having claimed that their tracks such as ‘Ride the Lightning’, ‘The Call of Ktulu’, ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Metal Militia’, ‘Jump in the Fire’, and ‘The Four Horsemen’ all contain his riffs.
Albeit at times, disputes over whose names belong on what song have sometimes got a bit dicey, wherein Mustaine once blocked a reissue of the Metallica demo ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ over credits which were apparently incorrect, and beyond accusing them of ripping him off, he has also done a bit of whistleblowing on behalf of other musicians, claiming that they lifted the riff on ‘Enter Sandman’ from the crossover thrash group Excel.
Ride the Lightning was the last Metallica album to give Mustaine a writing credit, but he has claimed that his fingerprints are all over Master of Puppets as well, specifically alleging that ‘Leper Messiah,’ the album’s grooving sixth track, features some of his material, a claim that guitarist Kirk Hammett has shot down pretty frankly: “Even though Dave might claim that he wrote ‘Leper Messiah’, he didn’t […] There’s maybe a chord progression that was in that song, like, maybe ten seconds that came from him […] In fact, I remember being in the room when Lars came up with the main musical motif.”
Dave claims he wrote the main sliding riff and the middle ‘spider’ riff (specifically around the three minutes and 14 seconds to the three minutes and 56 seconds mark), but the song is still officially credited to Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, and since Mustaine never formally challenged the credit or attempted to claim royalties, it remains listed that way to this day.
