James Hetfield is Metallica's rhythm guitarist, singer and principal lyricist, and the source of the most imitated sound in thrash metal. Born in Downey, California, he founded the band in 1981 by answering a classified ad placed by Lars Ulrich. His technical signature is the right hand. Hetfield plays entire riffs in downstrokes, without alternating, at tempos that would make alternating the obvious choice — a brutal physical demand that produces a uniform attack and a rhythmic precision no other technique delivers. It is why "Master of Puppets" sounds the way it does. As a singer he began with the thrash bark and gradually found pitch and nuance, until the black album (1991), when he began genuinely to sing. His lyrics deal with control, anger, war, addiction and religion, almost always in the first person. The biography runs through the work: raised in Christian Science, he lost his mother to a cancer she refused to treat, an episode that produced "The God That Failed". He was badly burned by pyrotechnics on stage in Montreal in 1992. He faced his alcoholism publicly, entering rehab in 2001 — recorded in the documentary Some Kind of Monster (2004) — and again in 2019. He still fronts the band, from Kill 'Em All (1983) to 72 Seasons (2023).
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