9 Metallica facts you probably didn’t know

On December 8, 2013, Metallica performed “Freeze ’Em All” inside a dome at Argentina’s Carlini Base for about 120 people, becoming the first act ever to play all seven continents (all within one year — a Guinness World Record). Environmental rules meant no amplification: the entire audience listened on headphones.

Thanks to Eddie Munson’s shred scene in the Stranger Things season 4 finale, the 1986 title track debuted at No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 2022 — its first-ever appearance on that chart, on 17.5 million streams in a week.

Since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking US sales in 1991, no album has sold more than Metallica (1991) — the first to pass 16 million SoundScan-era copies.

In 2016, Master of Puppets became the first heavy metal album added to the National Recording Registry as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

At the 1989 Grammys, the inaugural Hard Rock/Metal award went not to …And Justice for All but to Jethro Tull — still cited as the biggest upset in Grammy history. The Academy split the category the following year, and Metallica promptly won three in a row.

Lars Ulrich was a top-ten-ranked junior tennis player in Denmark when he moved to California in 1980 — then didn’t make his high school tennis team. Metal worked out better.

2011’s famously polarizing Lulu, a concept double-album based on Frank Wedekind’s plays, was the last full-length studio album Lou Reed made before his death in 2013.

The S&M2 shows with the San Francisco Symphony (September 2019) — twenty years after the original S&M — were the first events ever held at San Francisco’s Chase Center, and the filmed version became one of the highest-grossing concert films ever.

In 2023 the band bought a majority stake in Furnace Record Pressing, one of America’s largest vinyl plants. Meanwhile their All Within My Hands foundation has put more than $13.5 million into trade-skills scholarships across 75 community colleges in all 50 states, and donates to a local food bank at every tour stop.