Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett sat down with TouchTunes and revealed his jukebox favorites. Among them was his band’s ‘You Must Burn!’ from their latest album, ’72 Seasons,’ which he referred to as the song with the best heavy melodic riffs.
“‘You Must Burn’ is actually one of my favorites. Love the riffs in there,” he explained. “I loved the super heavy riff of Rob’s and the atmosphere that it’s created before I go into that long guitar solo, the end, it’s brilliant. I think those group of riffs are some of the best heavy melodic riffs that we’ve ever written.”
This might sound like it’s a lot, but Hammett submitted 700 different riffs for ’72 Seasons.’
Before the release of ‘Hardwired… To Self-Destruct’ in 2016, the guitarist lost his phone which had around 250 ideas. As early as 2017, he admitted to having another 500 ideas ready to go for new material. By the time of ’72 Seasons,’ he had built an even bigger library of riffs. Later, producer Greg Fidelman and Lars Ulrich sat down to sort them out before eventually asking for help from Hammett himself.
“Kirk sent me, I don’t know, 700 things…” Fidelman noted in an interview. “So when I told Lars how many Kirk had, Lars was like, ‘I’m not trying to get out of this, but why don’t you go through and knock it down halfway? Just the things you think are promising… split it in half at least. It’ll take us a month to go through that together.’ So I did that. Then once me and Lars had our pile of A-list riffs, I guess I’d call it, we’d pick 10 or 12 for a day.”
Given that Fidelman revealed there were over 1,000 ideas in the mix, the already long and detailed process was even more intense for ’72 Seasons.’