Photo credit: Ultimate Guitar
As the lead up to Robert and Michele head to Denver, CO, to catch Metallica’s 72 Seasons tour for the third time. We will be reviewing an album each day. This will be Robert’s 27th and 28th time seeing the band, and Michele’s 13th and 14th. We searched high and low on the web and found these are the 19 songs that Metallica has never performed live.
The thrash legends played their very first show on March 14, 1982. Since then, they’ve released 11 studio albums (13 if you include Garage Inc. and Lulu), and have performed across all seven continents. With such an extensive catalog and decades of concerts, it’s impressive how much material they’ve covered.
Given Metallica’s four decades of live performances, we were curious to find out which songs they’ve never played live before. To do this, we checked Setlist.fm and analyzed their entire tracklist to see which songs didn’t appear in their concert history.
In the early days of their career, with only a few tracks to choose from, it’s understandable that all the songs from Kill ’Em All and Ride the Lightning have been played live. However, they’ve also performed many songs from most of their other albums.
James Hetfield once said during a June 2024 episode of The Metallica Report podcast, “I would love to have played every song besides playing it in the studio. Yeah, I hope there’s a point and a place for every song before we’re done.” For this list, we excluded songs from Garage Inc. and Lulu, as we wanted it to consist solely of Metallica’s original material. Instrumentals weren’t counted either, although they’ve played many of their instrumental tracks live over the years.
Load
Reload
St. Anger
Hardwired… to Self-Destruct
72 Seasons
Least Favorite Song to Play Live According to Metallica
Escape (1984)
When “Ride the Lightning” first came out, “Escape” was seen by many as a cheesy sore sticking out in an otherwise prodigious thrash metal album, and some die-hard fans still perceive it as such.
Even James Hetfield himself famously stated his dread of performing the song live, in part due to its demanding nature. However, others have warmed up to the song since, especially after Metallica’s sound gradually streamlined throughout the following decades.
This historical artifact of a song has been performed live only once, during Metallica’s gig at Orion Music in 2012.
To learn more about Robert and Michele’s take on music (and roller coasters), please visit Rock n Costers on social media.
