Seek & Destroy

Metallica recorded it in May 1983 at a studio in New York, but the song had already existed before that: it made its live debut in 1982 and has been a staple of nearly every one of the band’s concerts ever since. It’s not just another track on the album *Kill 'Em All*; it’s the song they’ve played live the most times, with more than 1,600 performances as of October 2024. The interesting thing is that, although it sounds like a hunting anthem—and Hetfield joked that it was about that—the lyrics speak to the tension between the impulse to destroy and the decision not to. The opening riff—the one everyone recognizes instantly—isn’t original: it borrows the feel of Diamond Head’s “Dead Reckoning,” though Metallica took it to another level with those three mini-solos that appear near the end. The last solo, the one Kirk Hammett plays with that signature bend, has a tuning error at 3:47 that he himself has acknowledged as a “bum note.” It’s not a flaw, but part of its identity.

The song was written in the band’s early years, when they still didn’t have a set name on the scene. They recorded it in just seventeen days, with borrowed equipment and a tight budget, but the result went down in history: “Seek & Destroy” is the first song Metallica ever recorded in a studio. Since then, it has become a ritual at their shows: Hetfield often asks the audience to shout the final line along with him, and on some tours—such as the 1994 tour—the live version would stretch to twenty minutes with improvisations that included riffs from other songs. The tuning has also varied: between 1983 and 1994 they played it in standard tuning, then switched to flat tuning until 2000, returned to standard tuning, and finally settled on flat tuning starting in 2015. What hasn’t changed is its place in concerts: for more than a decade, from 2004 to 2015, it was the usual closing song of their sets. Even after the September 11, 2001, attacks, when some radio stations pulled songs due to their content, this one remained off the blacklist.