METALLICA: Best Riffs From Each Album (updated for July 2026)

Metallica are currently enjoying a highly triumphant moment. The kings of thrash metal are in the UK this week for their latter shows of the mammoth M72 tour, and they’ve not only been selling out stadiums across the country, they’ve actually been breaking attendance records! 

Not only that, they've quietly donated tens of thousands of dollars at each location to local charities, which has been earning the boys from California even more respect and love.

On top of it all, there’s a legendary, pioneering metal band who are kicking huge amounts of ass every night on tour, with a setlist generously littered with ‘Tallica classics. If you’ve seen them on this tour, you’ll know what I’m saying when I state that this might be the best they’ve ever been live. If you’ve not attended a show yet, well, you are in for one hell of a night!

To celebrate, I’ve put together a list of the band’s greatest ever riffs, with the single caveat being that I can only choose one from each album. Considering how rich their run from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All to 1991’s Black Album was for prime riffage, this is not an enviable task!

Indeed, my friend Keiran and I recently did this on video (see below), but where that was a democratic compromise, this time it’s all my choices! Quite a lot of them are the same ones, mind you, but that’s beside the point!

Get involved! Blast through this list of classic Metalli-riffs and then revisit all the other classics that my self-appointed rule forbids me from including!

It was a glorious thing to see them playing Hit the Lights last week in Hampden, but I’m still going to opt for the seminal Seek and Destroy here. A perennial live favourite, Seek and Destroy is a rallying call for Metallica fans, and the perfect blueprint for the band’s early thrash riffing style. Not as fast as some cuts, S&D nonetheless gets its head down and charges straight at you, with at least three cracking riff moments to enjoy.

This glorious cut from 1984’s Ride the Lightning is what thrash metal is all about. After a bombastic intro, a single crunchy guitar rattles out an absolute machine gun of a riff, filled with kinetic pre-mosh energy. The band joins a few bars in, bringing in levels of biblical doom that match the song’s subject matter.

I always used to consider this to be one of James Hetfield’s greatest riffs, until I found out that it wasn’t his! Yes indeed, this is a Kirk Hammett offering, and was actually part of a song from his ex-band Exodus, which he brought with him when he moved across to Metallica.

When trying to play this one, its downstrokes ONLY: up and down just doesn’t sound right, nor will it help with your technique. This is a tricky riff to master (harder than it sounds by quite a margin) and messing up that right hand muting will throw your whole rhythm and pacing out, so make sure you start slow and build up your ‘Hets’ (right arm guitar playing muscles, okay?) before attempting this one at full velocity.

Once you’ve sufficiently built up those Het muscles (yes, I’ve invented that term), it’s time to attempt a thrash rite of passage: the punishingly fast Master of Puppets riff. Taken at face value, this descending chromatic chunk of riffery doesn’t sound too taxing, but apply the Hetfield rule of DOWNSTROKES ONLY, and you’re entering a world of hurt. 

Many hopeful contenders throughout the years have tried and failed at this one, and when they insist on playing it in guitar stores, the shame is palpable. Practise it at home and keep that right hand relaxed as you play. You’ll get there!

This classic Metallica riff, from the 1986 album of the same name, uses every note in the E chromatic scale as it descends furiously down the neck. Rest assured, if you can play this riff cleanly and up to speed, using downstrokes only, you are awesome. Now, sit down and take a break: you’ve earned it.

James Hetfield must laugh when he hears about other musicians struggling to come up with enough good riffs for a record. Justice has an entire career’s worth of great riffs in one album, and Harvester of Sorrow has most of them in just the one tune! The attitude on this song is immense: the tempo and the syncopation that come so easily to Metallica are just a few of the elements that differentiate them from other thrash bands, and elevate ‘good’ into ‘great’.

 What is a ‘Harvester of Sorrow’? Don’t care, listen to them riffs! The clean riff (Papa Het favoured a Roland Jazz Chorus JC-120 for such tones) has a distinctly exotic vibe, without drifting into the iffy waters of cheeseball holiday music. Once the heaviness kicks in, Metallica do a thing that not many bands bother doing: they switch up the riff for something else. You do get a variation on the intro riff, but it gets swiftly dropped in favour of a completely new riff, which develops the song and provides a better platform for quality headbanging. As I say, Hetfield seems to have an inexhaustible stockpile of highly memorable riffs, and this song is a real highlight on an album that has a great many of them. Chhhyeah!

Metallica’s heaviest riff? It’s certainly one of them, and Hetfield himself always remarks on it before they launch into it live, so I’m going with him on this!

As with certain other ‘Tallica riffs (I’m thinking directly about The Thing That Should Not Be, from Master of Puppets), Sad But True garners its fierceness from its relative lack of pace: this thing is a giant monolith of a riff, stomping on everything in its path. Huge breezeblocks of notes drop on you from a great height, grinding and squashing you flat as they move on.

The tone on this song is monstrous, and that’s partly down to the tuning (D standard, so a whole step lower than they usually went at this point), the gear (ESP and Mesa/Boogie to the max) and partly down to leaving as many gaps of silence in the riff as there are notes. This ain't thrash: this is something altogether more sinister.

Fun fact: Hetfield actually overdubbed the palm-muted bits on extra tracks to toughen the sound up even further. Good lad.

Whilst it’s fair to say that Metallica’s post-Black Album records have been less filled with classics than those that came before, there’s still gold to be found for those intrepid prospectors venturing into the likes of 1996’s Load record. My pick today is the final track, and takes us very much into ‘epic’ territory.

Have you ever felt like there was a bit of a Wild West vibe to certain Metallica songs? If so, this is where it all comes together, particularly if you listen to the live S&M version featuring a full-on cinematic orchestra. The Outlaw Torn is a huge, brooding beast with a blunt, staggering intro that opens out into a grand canyon-sized riff full of drama and portent. Hetfield’s soaring vocal evokes a widescreen sense of epic emotion, furthering the ‘frontier’ vibe and providing the band with one of their most underrated songs. 

Extra points are awarded to Hammett for his deliciously atonal slide solo towards the end of the studio version: talk about making a guitar scream?

For Metallica, this is a monumentally simple riff. The power is in how catchy it is, and how it absolutely blasts along like a rocket. It’s a hot rod of a song, something to motivate and activate. It's also normally accompanied by pyro when it gets a live outing, and pyro obviously elevates all songs into greatness. 

Sing it with me: “Gimme fyoo, gimme faah, gimme that which ah disaaah!”

Metallica’s experimental performances with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra were mostly a resounding success, considering there were an extra 100 musicians all suddenly looking for things to do inside songs that happily existed without them.

Some ‘Tallica tunes fared better than others, though due to the band’s style, most of their back catalogue is symphonic in nature anyway. One particular win was in the re-rendering of Call of Ktulu from Ride the Lightning. Without losing anything, the orchestra added light, shade and dark drama to an already atmospheric song.

And that main Am riff that ends on Eb? Totally creepy, Lovecraftian and allegedly one of ex-guitarist Dave Mustaine’s riffs.

Do not mention the snare sound. Is there a good Metallica album hiding in here? If it was trimmed by 20 minutes and leaned up a bit? I feel like there could be, and in the title track, we at least get a peach of a riff. According to a quick and flippant Google search, this one is played in Drop C tuning, which surprised me since I thought it was a good bit lower, but there you go. 

Frantic’s another good one from this album, and I wonder whether it has been a little bit tainted by that documentary Some Kind of Monster that was released around this time? As a Metallica fan, I find it brave that they put it out there, and I also kinda hope I never see it again!

It was a deliberate return to 80s thrash for 2008’s Death Magnetic. There was no longer a sense of competition with the by-then dead Nu Metal scene, and a distinct hunger for stuff that sounded actually heavy. Death Magnetic provided that to a degree, with celebrity ‘producer’/soothsayer/man-with-Midas-touch Rick Rubin helming the project. 

Death Magnetic was neither a full return to form nor a disaster, but something more incongruous: a heavy, thrashy Metallica album that was…fine. Nevertheless, it had its moments, and End of the Line was a good, hard, early-album kick in the ass. It still has echoes of the band’s 90s blues-based phase, but it’s blended with cold, hard thrash.

Yep, I listened to Lulu all the way through and found the last song to be my favourite. Metallica have taken a lot of risks in their career, and I suppose this is one of their biggest. Working on a collaboration album with Lou Reed is not something you’d ever have guessed from Hetfield & Co, and that’s exactly why it’s such a cool thing to have done.

It’s a long record, and it has a lot of spoken word stuff, as well as the inexplicable and kind of hilarious ‘I am the TABLE!’ refrain from single The View, but there are moments here to cherish too.

Junior Dad is the near-20 minute album closer, and to me it has a very unusual, almost elegiac power to it. It’s not even all that clear that it’s Metallica playing the song (actually, Lars’ drumming is very ‘there’ and I don’t mean that in a nasty way!) and the main riff throughout is a mixture of mournful and somewhat innocent, something I’d not normally associate with Metallica! 

This may well have been the last recording that Lou Reed ever put out, which only adds to that strange power. There’s even a volia-type sound on there, exactly what John Cale would’ve done with Lou back in the Velvet Underground days.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this is an underrated record, and a powerful song. Give it another go!

How did you feel about this album? I’m asking only because I didn’t care too much for it when it appeared in 2016, but later listening sessions have seen the songs improve quite significantly in my estimations. I wonder if it’s just a slower burn, for an epic metal album?

Anyway, I think it’s pretty obvious that 5th single Spit Out the Bone has the cream of the riffs from this album in it. From the pummelling intro (that could’ve come straight off any of the first three records) to that super cool descending chorus riff, this is a tune that barely lets up at all. It’s all the better for it, too!

Get busy with the alternate picking for this one: it’s much too fast to be played with only downstrokes…isn’t it?

There’s not enough gain on the guitars. The intro takes too long. Ah okay, there we are. Chasing Light is one of the better cuts on Metallica’s most recent offering, 72 Seasons. This somewhat more placid variety of metal has some of Hetfield’s best vocals throughout the record, and if it doesn’t quite heat up the way we’d hope, well, I suppose that’s the difference between being 22 and 62, right? 

Chasing Light carries the overall theme of the record - that of bringing light to darkness, which is reflected in the yellow and black artwork - and supplies some solid Metallica riffing.

This is an impossible blog. Metallica have too many grade-A riffs in their repertoire to choose only one per album! Who thought this was a good idea?

Well, if anything, I hope it inspires you to go back through the Metalli-catalogue and uncover both classic tunes and deeper cuts that maybe haven’t met your ears in a while. It’s one of the best bodies of work in metal without doubt, and no matter how obscure and extreme your tastes get, I reckon that if you love guitar riffs, you’ll always love Metallica.

See you in the snakepit!

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