James Hetfield & Metallica Ignite Glasgow With Fire, Four Drum Kits, and a Proclaimers Twist

Fifty thousand people baking under a Glasgow heatwave, Ennio Morricone rolling across the stadium speakers, and James Hetfield somewhere beyond the smoke — Metallica's one-night stop at Hampden Park was never going to be anything less than a spectacle. This is what the closing chapter of a three-year-plus world tour looks like when you're one of the biggest metal bands the planet has ever produced.

A Tour Built for the Obsessive and the Occasional Fan Alike

The M72 World Tour — launched on the back of Metallica's 2023 album 72 Seasons — has largely run as a series of mini-residencies, with back-to-back nights promising zero setlist repeats, a model designed to reward the diehards willing to show up twice. Glasgow got just one night, which meant the band had to balance deep-cut treasure hunting with undeniable crowd-pleasers — and according to The Guardian Music, they pulled it off with practiced precision. Fifteen songs carved a path through decades of catalogue, from the bludgeoning early-era Hit the Lights off Kill 'Em All to the sprawling emotional weight of The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters.

Hetfield Holds Court in the Snake Pit

The stage setup was central to the whole evening's energy. Metallica performed in the round, with a ring-shaped platform surrounding a densely packed standing area the band calls the "snake pit" — and that inner circle became the engine room of the night. Every time a member crossed toward those fans up front, the reciprocal charge was immediate and electric. Hetfield worked the configuration like a man who has spent four decades learning exactly how to bend a crowd to his will, alternating between thunderous stillness and restless movement across the stage. When the band slipped into Nothing Else Matters, he reportedly clocked fans crowd surfing mid-ballad and offered a dry, bemused nod to the chaos of it all — whatever it takes.

Lars Ulrich and Four Drum Kits (Yes, Four)

If Hetfield is the gravitational center of Metallica's live show, Lars Ulrich is its kinetic chaos. Positioned not behind one kit but four separate drum stations placed around the ring, Ulrich kept moving throughout the set — leaping off his stool to play standing up during intros, even throwing himself into a back bend at the climax of Creeping Death to the roar of the crowd behind him. It's the kind of performance that reminds you why stadium metal, done right, still hits harder than almost anything else live music has to offer. You could draw a line between Metallica's theatrical command of a massive venue and the way artists like Rosalía turns Madison Square Garden into a cathedral on her Lux Tour — the ambition to make enormity feel intimate.

Covers, Circle Pits, and a Glasgow Moment

One of the tour's recurring traditions is a locally flavored cover, handled on this night by bassist Rob Trujillo and guitarist Kirk Hammett. The choice — The Proclaimers' 500 Miles — landed as a loveable crowd-pleaser, even if it skewed toward the obvious. Meanwhile, 72 Seasons, the lone representative from the band's newest record, still managed to spark not one but two mini circle pits in the standing area. That kind of response from a relatively fresh track, buried in a setlist of war-tested classics, says something real about where the band still stands creatively.

The Final Run

When Seek & Destroy kicked off the closing triple-punch alongside Master of Puppets and Enter Sandman, Hampden Park stopped being a stadium and became something closer to a single living organism. The energy that had been building in the snake pit all night finally swallowed the whole venue whole. For a band operating in their fifth decade, the vitality on that Glasgow stage wasn't nostalgia — it was proof. Just as Olivia Rodrigo launched her all-women festival Daisy Chain Fields to champion the future of live music, Metallica's M72 finale is a reminder that the past, when it hits this hard, still has something urgent to say.

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