Metallica Guitarist Kirk Hammett Discusses the Best Riffs on ’72 Seasons’

Kirk Hammett recently spoke with TouchTunes and shared his favorite tracks to play on a jukebox. One of the songs he picked was his band’s ‘You Must Burn!’ from their latest album, ’72 Seasons.’ He called it a song with some of the best heavy melodic riffs the band has ever written.

“‘You Must Burn’ is actually one of my favorites. Love the riffs in there,” Hammett said. “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 a lot, but Hammett actually submitted 700 different riffs for ’72 Seasons.’

Before the release of ‘Hardwired… To Self-Destruct’ in 2016, Hammett lost his phone, which had around 250 ideas stored on it. As early as 2017, he said he had another 500 ideas ready for new material. By the time they started working on ’72 Seasons,’ Hammett had built up an even bigger collection of riffs. Producer Greg Fidelman and drummer Lars Ulrich later went through the riffs and eventually had to ask Hammett himself for help.

“Kirk sent me, I don’t know, 700 things…” Fidelman said 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.”

With over 1,000 ideas in the mix, the already long and complex process of creating ’72 Seasons’ became even more challenging.

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