LAS VEGAS, NV. — Metallica had a tender moment at Sphere on Thursday, just after a wretched sea monster mangled the Las Vegas skyline.
On the opening night of its “Life Burns Faster” stand, Metallica had a 16k-resolution arsenal to match the bombast of its music. While the quartet — the first metal band to perform at Sphere — tore through the instrumental deep cut “The Call of Ktulu,” that drippy leviathan swatted at life-sized fighter jets on the screen.
When the leathery beast slunk off, singer James Hetfield dedicated the track to the band’s founding bassist, who died in a tour bus crash in 1986. “In honor of our fallen brother, Mr. Clifford Lee Burton,” Hetfield said, to a bellowing crowd. “We love you, and we miss you, brother.”
Metallica, the biggest band in metal, thrives in that tension between the genre’s outrageous grandeur, grimy nihilism and outlaw camaraderie. At “Life Burns Faster,” a series of two-night engagements that stretches into March next year, they stayed fleshy and ferocious as a band beneath the digital carnage.
Metal, even when siloed off from broader music culture, has always been a commercial powerhouse. Metallica remains its flagship live act. In 2023 alone, they closed out the all-star Power Trip festival at the Empire Polo Grounds, and still played two in-the-round nights at SoFi Stadium.
They’ve been enormous for generations, and made no bones about their ambitions. The band’s ongoing “M72” tour is hovering around the 10 highest grossing tours ever. So it was only a matter of time before the band – Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Robert Trujillo and drummer Lars Ulrich – got curious about the rare venue that could go toe-to-toe with them for sheer firepower. (Onstage and at the box office – Metallica knows counterculture can be both sincere and extremely lucrative).
“We’re grateful you’ve taken the time, energy and the cash” to attend opening weekend, Hetfield said onstage on Saturday. Nice of him to acknowledge the table stakes.
By day, there was much charm in seeing nearly 20,000 metal fans swarming the Vegas strip in Metallica gear, flying in with buddies, spouses, kids and grandkids no matter the four-figure tickets and obligatory crates of merch. (The old adage that metal fans are nice people pretending to be mean held up). On Sphere’s escalators, grey-bearded lifers hugged in shredded battle jackets; tween girls in “Master of Puppets” hoodies drummed along to every fill; accents came from eastern Europe, Latin America and all the world over. My cab driver effusively recounted sneaking in to see Metallica at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley in 1983.
Classic rock and jam bands like the Eagles and Dead & Co. largely use Sphere’s A/V capabilities as a psychedelic background to stately tunes. Metallica is larger-than-life as is — they need little more than a Hetfield snarl or Hammett solo to feel tectonic. On Thursday and Saturday nights, they were nasty and resonant as a live band, even beneath 160,000 square feet of LED mayhem.
Metallica has one of the deepest catalogs and intensely-attached fandoms in rock. Sequencing the first Sphere shows would be a global statement, and the band played stellar ones on Thursday and Saturday. From the howitzer of opener “Battery” through the white-knuckle turns of “Creeping Death,” they knew they were still playing to the faithful, albeit in a whole new sort of arena.
As with all Sphere acts, that visual wattage can absolutely grip you, or it can feel using a flamethrower to grill. (I texted some “Ktulu” footage to a serious metalhead friend, who replied “Lol,” then “Sick,” which seemed apt).
Some backdrops were creepy set dressing, while others had tactile brutality — Sphere often had the rumble-seat effect blaring. Metallica locked into the martial imagery around “The Shortest Straw,” “Sad But True” and the MTV-era hit “The Memory Remains.” “Wherever I May Roam” used gulp-inducing hairpin turns, and fans flinched when the statue from “…And Justice For All” collapsed in pieces (an apropos image, these days!)
While the band surely didn’t intend this coincidence, for anyone watching the Christa Pike saga, it was surreal to hear Hetfield scream ”Death in the air, strapped in the electric chair / This can’t be happening to me” on “Ride The Lighting” inside a gigantic execution chamber.
The set snaked through freewheeling Hammett and Trujillo jams, the recent single “Lux Æterna” and the ballad “Nothing Else Matters” (Metallica writes aching melodies and forlon guitar lines, too). They closed Thursday with “Seek & Destroy,” a roiling cut from their 1983 debut “Kill ‘Em All,” and “Master of Puppets,” given new life as a major plot point in the horror-thriller series “Stranger Things.”
On Saturday, the band reprised its recent two-nights/no-repeats gambit with a completely different setlist. Equally rangy, if perhaps more ruminative.
Peeling out of the gate with “Blackened,” framed as massive silhouettes on a white field, they roared through “Fuel” and lurched into “Leper Messiah” and “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” each great, grinding cuts from “Puppets.” “Devil’s Dance” and the reicide-themed visuals of “King Nothing” framed their controversial “Load”/”Reload” period as a core transition. Newer cuts “72 Seasons” and “Hardwired” channeled the old viciousness.
They played a lovely “The Unforgiven” and dedicated an exploratory take on “Orion” to Cliff Burton again, followed by Thin Lizzy’s “Whiskey In The Jar,” a major influence on their riffing. But the set came into its full power with a duel of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “One,” framed around WWI-era bombing footage and parades of mangled skeleton soldiers. Metallica’s always been more existential than topical, but haven’t we all scrolled our feeds recently and muttered – “Darkness imprisoning me / All that I see, absolute horror.”
They closed on “Enter Sandman,” the only real choice for their inaugural Vegas weekend. Two perfectly-tuned sets, retrofitted for this decadent monolith.
Is it a little weird that metal is now welcome as an elite Las Vegas entertainment commodity? Perhaps. But the genre’s been a cunning spectacle since Ozzy’s first crucifix (or Venom getting in league with Satan). Metallica’s generations of disaffected dirtbags — this writer among them — were primed for this gig. Metal’s always been escapist, even at its grittiest. Now it’s a five-star vacation destination too.
