Metallica

Explore the band's historical lineups, musicians, and studio albums.

Active4 formations11 studio albums

Formation chronology

Newest first

Formation 4 of 4

For Death Magnetic, Metallica deliberately changed course again. Rick Rubin replaced longtime producer Bob Rock and encouraged the band to reconnect with the instincts of its earlier records, while engineer Greg Fidelman handled the day-to-day sessions. Released in September 2008, the album became Robert Trujillo's first Metallica studio record and went to No. 1 around the world. Fidelman subsequently became Metallica's producer, creating a studio partnership that continued through Hardwired... to Self-Destruct and 72 Seasons.
On December 8, 2013, Metallica played inside a transparent dome at Argentina's Carlini Station in Antarctica. Because of environmental restrictions, the performance was transmitted to the small audience through headphones rather than conventional amplified speakers. The show completed a year in which Metallica had performed on every continent, earning recognition from Guinness World Records as the first band to play all seven continents in a single year.
James Hetfield built the concept of 72 Seasons around the first 18 years of a person's life. He described those 72 seasons as the period in which family and experience help form someone's beliefs about who they are, with adulthood often becoming either a reenactment of those early patterns or an attempt to escape them. The idea gave Metallica's 2023 album a unifying theme centered on childhood, identity, and the baggage people carry forward.

Formation 3 of 4

St. Anger is Metallica's only studio album without an official Metallica bassist on the recordings. Jason Newsted left in January 2001, and producer Bob Rock filled the vacant role while the remaining members worked on the album. Robert Trujillo won the subsequent bassist auditions and joined before the album's 2003 touring cycle, but Rock, not Trujillo, plays the bass heard on the released record.
The making of St. Anger coincided with one of the most unstable periods in Metallica's history. After Newsted's departure, James Hetfield entered rehabilitation in 2001 and the band's work stopped while its members struggled with whether and how Metallica could continue. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky had begun documenting the sessions for what was supposed to be a promotional project. Their footage instead became Some Kind of Monster, an unusually candid record of a major band nearly coming apart and rebuilding itself.
Metallica deliberately changed how it wrote St. Anger. Lars Ulrich said the band imposed a rule that riffs, lyrics, solos, and arrangements would not be developed privately and brought into the studio. Instead, the music had to be created collectively in the room, turning the studio from a place where finished ideas were executed into the place where the songs themselves were written. That experiment helped produce one of the strangest and most divisive records in Metallica's catalog.

Formation 2 of 4

Jason Newsted's first Metallica studio album became famous partly for how difficult his bass is to hear. Newsted said in 1991 that ...And Justice for All had "hardly any bass," while James Hetfield later explained that Newsted often doubled his rhythm-guitar parts and that Hetfield's heavily scooped guitar tone occupied much of the same low-frequency space. The controversial mix has remained one of the album's most discussed production decisions.
"One" pushed Metallica into territory the band had previously avoided. Inspired by Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, it became Metallica's first music video, combining the band's performance with material from the film adaptation. MTV exposed the band to a much wider audience, Metallica performed the song at the 1989 Grammy Awards, and one year later "One" earned the band's first Grammy, for Best Metal Performance.
Kirk Hammett says the riff that became "Enter Sandman" arrived around three in the morning while he was playing guitar after listening heavily to Soundgarden. Producer Bob Rock then pushed Metallica toward a fuller sound and more direct arrangements for the 1991 Metallica album. The change was transformative: the Black Album went to No. 1 around the world, sold more than 16 million copies, and turned Metallica into a global mainstream act.

Formation 1 of 4

Metallica's move from Los Angeles to the Bay Area was closely tied to Cliff Burton. After the No Life 'Til Leather demo began circulating through the underground tape-trading scene, the band found a much stronger reception around San Francisco and convinced Burton to leave Trauma and replace Ron McGovney. Metallica then relocated north, putting the band in the scene where the lineup that recorded its first three albums would take shape.
By 1986, Metallica was breaking far beyond the underground. Master of Puppets reached the U.S. Top 30 while the band toured with Ozzy Osbourne, but the ascent ended catastrophically on September 27, when Metallica's tour bus crashed in Sweden and killed Cliff Burton. The band has described Burton's combination of musical theory, experimentation, and jamming as a major force in its development. More than 40 bassist auditions followed before Jason Newsted was chosen.
Thirty-six years after its release, "Master of Puppets" found an entirely new audience through Stranger Things. Its appearance in the July 2022 season-four finale caused streams to surge and sent the song onto the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in its history. A song created by the Burton-era lineup in the mid-1980s had become a major pop-culture event for another generation.