Metallica’s Kirk Hammett Hits Back at Fans Who Hate His Solos

Metallica‘s Kirk Hammett challenges shredders who feel they can outplay him in response to online haters. As for sweep picking, he also criticized its use in music, asking, “Why do it?” In an exclusive interview with Total Guitar, Hammett mocked the idea that his solo on the song “Lux Æterna” is bad because it is not difficult to play. “Yeah, my f— friends down the street could probably play a better solo than “Lux Æterna” – but what’s the point?” he argued. “For me, what’s appropriate is playing for the song and playing in the moment. “Lux Æterna,” Metallica’s first single from 72 Seasons, saw Hammett’s guitar performance go viral. Many YouTubers recorded their own ‘improved’ versions of his solo, which some called Hammett’s “worst solo.” One video was titled “Why everyone HATES the solo in Metallica’s new song.” The criticism doesn’t faze Hammett. “I was just laughing the whole time,” he says. “I could string together like six or seven three-octave arpeggios in 16th notes, sit there every day and practice it and go, ‘Hey, look what I can do!’ but where am I gonna put it? That won’t work in any Metallica song! “Arpeggios? Come on! In a guitar solo, mapped out like a lot of people do, four or five chords with a different arpeggio over each one? It sounds like an exercise. I don’t want to listen to exercises and warm-ups every time I hear a song.” 

Hammett will only make the exception to that rule for three people. “The only guys out there who I think convincingly play arpeggios as a means of expression are Joe Satriani, Yngwie [Malmsteen], and Paul Gilbert,” he told Total Guitar. He criticized sweep picking, the technique loved by guitarists like Michael Angelo Batio. “Sweeping to me is a weird thing to begin with because sweeping’s incredibly easy, but it sounds incredibly hard,” he added. “That’s cool once or twice, but I mean, why do it? When it first came out in the late 70s, by the early 80s everyone was doing it. By not doing it, you stood out.” Some guitarists may dismiss Hammett’s heavy reliance on the minor pentatonic scale, but he contends that its five notes make it more challenging. “It’s actually harder to say stuff with pentatonics because you don’t have that many notes,” he said. “It’s easier to play modal. I will challenge anyone on that.” Hammett still appreciates technique, however. “I love from the heart playing, and I’ve heard real technical playing that’s from the heart,” he said.

“Allan Holdsworth, Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, Yngwie – they all play from the heart, but for a lot of guys it’s just like sports or the Olympics. Music is to reflect beauty, creativity, feeling, life. There is a place, and there’s an audience for all that stuff, but I feel there comes a time when people just get tired of that. “Today, you know, people are doing really interesting stuff with technique,” Hammett concludes. “Technique is reaching new boundaries and I love that, but I have to stress it’s important to play for the song. If you do that, your music will have that much more integrity and lasting power.” As Hammett moved away from modal scales and arpeggios, he’s taken on more improvisational solos, leading him to declare, “It drives me nuts having to play that f— guitar solo in Master of Puppets every time – I’m freaking bored of it.” In a direct response to Hammett’s interview, Bradley Hall, who created the video “Metallica Lux Æterna But The Solo Doesn’t Suck,” called the Greeny owner out for his “excuses for lazy-ass playing.” During a video posted to his YouTube channel, Hall addressed Hammett’s numerous quotes, including the admission that sweep picking is “weird” because it’s “incredibly easy, but sounds incredibly hard.”

While Hall argued listeners had a right to question Hammett’s playing, he also claimed his interpretation of their criticism was in error: Metallica fans were not concerned about the difficulty of the solo but rather with its content. “People are not mocking him and his solos because they’re not hard to play. People are mocking him because the solos sound lazy and completely throwaway,” Hall said. “This is the most common deflection that people use when people are criticizing their playing. It’s not about who can play the most complicated solo – he’s missing the point and the point of the criticism. “I think most people understood what I was trying to do with this video. But some missed the point, of course, including Kirk, I guess,” he continued. “It was not to try and one-up him. That’s cringe. “The idea of the video was just to try and show what could have been done if you just paid a bit more attention to what’s going on in the backing – follow the riff and the rhythms and chords and all that stuff.” 

Hall also took issue with Hammett’s attack on the tendency to load solos with complex technical proficiency: “This is actually insulting to read coming from someone of Kirk’s caliber. If you can’t implement arpeggios into a solo and make it not sound like an exercise, then that’s just a ‘you’ problem.” Hall discussed 72 Seasons in general in his video and stated that Hammett’s solo in “Lux Æterna” indicated a wider trend in his playing style. He went on, “These are not memorable phrases. These just sound like somebody going through the motions and just playing something off the top of their head and not really being bothered to go back and refine it. “Just because you went down the route of playing something more raw and improvised, it doesn’t mean that you have this right now to be all high and mighty. Fair enough if the level of improvisation was good and the phrasing was really nice. But it’s not. It just sounds like super-regurgitated, boring, lazy phrasing.”