Metallica Thrashes Las Vegas With Five Decades of Monumental Metal
On the heels of its third anniversary in September, Sphere Las Vegas got considerably heavier Thursday, when Metallica launched its 24-show Life Burns Faster residency. The band brings its “No Repeat Weekend” format, introduced with the M72 World Tour in 2023, to this series. Each Thursday-Saturday pairing features two completely different set lists, with no songs repeated between nights. (See the full opening-night set list below.)
With opening night representing only half of the experience, Metallica had plenty of room to go deep. The 15-song set leaned heavily into the band’s early catalog for a sold-out crowd stacked with die-hards who knew every change, chant and guitar solo coming their way.
At 8:48 p.m., AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” signaled that things were underway. At first, there was almost nothing onstage — no drums, just microphone stands on an undulating platform surrounding the venue’s Snake Pit. Then came “The Ecstasy of Gold,” followed by a sudden reveal: Lars Ulrich and his kit seemed to appear from nowhere as “Battery” detonated the room.
For the opening stretch of “Battery” and “Creeping Death,” the crowd itself became the visual. Cameras multiplied the audience onto the massive display, effectively making it all about the fans before dropping them into increasingly dark and elaborate worlds.
“Sad but True” put the quartet inside a massive Gothic cathedral, with the musicians appearing in towering stained-glass windows packed with guitars, symbols and enough saturated detail to land somewhere between medieval church art and a pinball machine. Enormous organ pipes faced the room. Nine microphone positions allowed James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo to work the stage, while Hetfield shed guitars with almost the frequency of a pop star changing looks.
“The Shortest Straw” went full Vegas, with imagery of cards and slot machines, while “The Day That Never Comes” featured hourglasses rising from a barren landscape, streams of sand falling through them as Ulrich resurfaced in another position.
“…And Justice for All” went considerably darker. Lady Justice appeared bound and under surveillance, with prison guards surrounding her before the entire world began to crumble. A fan near me who said he had seen Metallica 23 times couldn’t remember ever hearing the song live. (After a quick fact-check, I confirmed they haven’t played the song live in 12 years.)
The visual intensity nearly disappeared for “Nothing Else Matters.” After Hammett’s extended guitar intro, one of the night’s most familiar songs was allowed to breathe. With far less happening around the band, the immersive quality of Sphere’s sound became especially apparent: The quiet passages stayed intimate before the final thunderous riffs brought the room back to its feet.
Then came one of the night’s wildest moments. For “The Call of Ktulu,” darkness opened into a vast oceanic world as an enormous creature rose from the sea, expanding until it occupied the entire visual field. It was a beautifully literal nod to the Lovecraftian mythology already baked into the song’s title, only now the monster Metallica had left to listeners’ imaginations for decades could loom hundreds of feet above them. Hetfield dedicated the instrumental to late bassist Cliff Burton.
“Lux Æterna” sent yellow-green streaks and ribbons of light racing across the dome as Ulrich’s drums appeared in a third location. Capturing all the action in 360 degrees to project the band onto the screens, an unmanned camera traveled around the stage on a track. “Ride the Lightning” delivered one of the evening’s most literal — and effective — visual payoffs. Electricity tore through a blue-violet sky and an enormous electric chair materialized above Hetfield.
During “Seek & Destroy,” which Hetfield introduced as a “shitty song they wrote when they were 12 years old,” the scene was a black-and-white garage crowded with amps, instruments, posters and flyers before images of young Metallica began filling the room. The past then collided with the present as the garage gave way to a red digital landscape, the musicians in real time caught inside futuristic “SEARCH” graphics while one of the band’s oldest songs stretched into a prolonged exchange with the audience. It was one of the night’s most telling juxtapositions: Metallica stood inside the most technologically advanced production of its career while quite literally looking back at its younger selves.
Dropping music born in garages and small clubs into Sphere’s hyper-engineered environment felt completely natural. The technology didn’t update the songs; the songs proved big enough to absorb it.
“Master of Puppets” brought the night full circle. A burning red-orange horizon gave way to seemingly endless rows of monumental white crosses extending from behind the stage toward an impossible horizon. The cemetery eventually morphed into a more surreal green-hued world as the finale kept building, Metallica at times appearing almost miniature beneath the scale of its surroundings.
While other Sphere productions have focused on theatrical reinterpretations of artists’ tracks, Metallica’s story remains firmly rooted in the narrative of noise, with the Sphere’s complementary visual fantasy as the icing on the cake. It begins at the musicians’ fingertips: a pick hitting a string, a stick meeting a drumhead. Technology takes those notes, separates them with extraordinary clarity and sends them outward until the waves reach the audience — and the real effect is the feelings that happen when they land.
Nearly five decades in, Metallica didn’t need Sphere to make their music feel current. Over two hours, the songs prove they exist in a space that is completely timeless.
Opening Night Set List
- “Battery” — 1986
- “Creeping Death” — 1984
- “Now That We’re Dead” — 2016
- “Sad but True” — 1991
- “The Shortest Straw” — 1988
- “Wherever I May Roam” — 1991
- “The Day That Never Comes” — 2008
- “…And Justice for All” — 1988
- “Nothing Else Matters” — 1991
- “The Call of Ktulu” — 1984
- “Lux Æterna” — 2023
- “Ride the Lightning” — 1984
- “The Memory Remains” — 1997
- “Seek & Destroy” — 1983
- “Master of Puppets” — 1986
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