Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has picked out the album from his career on which he thinks he nailed his playing the most. Speaking to Metal Hammer in their latest issue, Hammett is asked what he thinks his finest moment as a player is – and he may surprise some fans by not exactly picking Metallica’s most technically complex material as his answer.
“It’s weird, because my opinion of that changes all the time,” he explains. “I don’t sit around listening to Metallica, so sometimes something comes on and I’m like,
‘I haven’t heard this in fucking five years! I forgot about that sound.’ I don’t look in the rear-view mirror too often. The whole band is like that – we just move on. What’s the next cool thing we can do? It’s just how we are. But I will say, there was a period where I thought my playing was fucking spot on, and that was The Black Album. Those solos wrote themselves! Almost all of them worked out instantly.
“There were only a few things I wasn’t prepared for, and that was The Unforgiven solo, which is pretty well documented,” he responds, referring to the problems he had coming up with a solo that fit the song after producer Bob Rock expressed dissatisfaction with his initial ideas. “And the solo for My Friend Of Misery. But because the solo of The Unforgiven ended up being so spontaneous, that made me want to do them all like that from that point on.”
Metallica recently announced yet another leg to their ongoing 72 Seasons world tour, including two shows in London promising a different set each night. Support on the dates will come from a mix of Gojira, Pantera, Knocked Loose and Avatar.
Read more from Hammett in Metal Hammer‘s latest issue, out now.