Playlists

On September 6, 2017, during the marathon WorldWired Tour (February 2016-August 2019), Metallica played the second of two scheduled dates at Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome: at one point, roughly halfway through the setlist, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich stepped off the stage, leaving room for guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo. In itself this was nothing new — the two had taken that space before to jam on something — but the novel twist this time was that they played "Radar Love", the classic anthem by legendary Dutch band Golden Earring, dating back to 1973.

It was the first instance of what would go on to become something of a tradition for the band: paying tribute to local artists.

The following September 8, at the Paris-Bercy arena, in that same slot of the setlist, the pair played Trust's "Antisocial", a landmark of Francophone heavy metal from 1980.

Two days later, still at Paris-Bercy, rather than bore the crowd by repeating the same trick, the duo unveiled a new cover: Joe Dassin's "Les Champs-Élysées" (released in 1969, itself already a cover of Jason Crest's "Waterloo Road").

While the two previous tributes were in keeping with Metallica's musical background, moving between hard rock and metal, this last one was originally a radio-friendly orchestral pop tune, utterly removed from their usual path.

The game continued on September 12 at the Cologne arena, where they played "Zehn kleine Jägermeister", the 1996 reggae hit by German punk band Die Toten Hosen.

At that point Metallica moved into the British leg of the tour, with covers that won't be covered in this article, since they drew from the repertoire of universally known Anglo-American artists.

On November 1, at Antwerp's Sportpaleis, Hammett and Trujillo played "This Is Rock 'N Roll" by the Kids, a local punk band that wasn't even particularly famous, though much revered by cult followers. Since the song was in English, the bassist tried his hand at singing it: all the covers listed so far had, in fact, only been sung by the crowd, following the two musicians' lead.

Two days later, at the same venue, the bar was raised: the song being honoured this time was the hugely famous "Ça plane pour moi" by Plastic Bertrand, which is indeed in French, but Trujillo decided to sing it anyway. It would be the first of many non-English-language songs he would tackle in the years that followed.

There is no other band or artist, at least not one as high-profile as Metallica, that has made such an effort, paying tribute with such consistency to music produced by various local cultures, repeatedly stressing during their introductions how important they feel it is to keep that memory alive.

Coldplay have made a few attempts along these lines ("Napule è" by Pino Daniele in Naples, "Madonina" by Giovanni D'Anzi in Milan, "De música ligera" by Soda Stereo in Buenos Aires, "Sen o Warszawie" by Czesław Niemen in Warsaw), but these were exceptions, whereas Metallica did it at every single show for several years running (from September 2017 to August 2019, and then again from May to September 2024).

Of course, should you be brave enough to head to YouTube and listen to the results, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise: Trujillo is not a singer, and it shows, just as Hammett is not a particularly technical guitarist. The outcome is riddled with inaccuracies, wrong notes and rough edges (the version of "Caruso" by Lucio Dalla, performed on 14 February 2018 at the Unipol Arena in Bologna, is downright embarrassing).

Still, let's look on the bright side: the two of them had to learn one new song after another, sometimes at a punishing pace, and Trujillo threw himself into singing in languages often considered fiendishly difficult even by seasoned linguists and polyglots, from Polish to Hungarian to Finnish, and in several cases he even managed to sound fairly comprehensible, at least according to native speakers' comments found online. All of this, it's worth repeating, without anyone forcing them to do any of it.

Whatever one's opinion of the recent, controversial output of the most popular metal band of all time, this series of covers is a commendable, praiseworthy effort that deserves a celebratory feature, especially on OndaRock, a site that has long placed great emphasis on covering the music scenes of non-English-speaking countries (a fact that makes it something of a one-of-a-kind presence on the Italian scene, and arguably on the global one too: there's Beehype, but it only covers new releases, ignoring the past histories of the various countries it deals with).

For the occasion, the complete playlist of the 62 covered songs has been put together on Spotify, in chronological order of performance: the idea of leaving out the more famous tracks, such as those by Abba, Europe, A-Ha, Scorpions, Falco or Rammstein, was considered, but all things considered they are a small minority. Most of the material is known only in its country of origin, and it's a journey well worth taking, both for its stylistic variety, at times bordering on the surreal (ranging from the most abrasive post-punk to the lightest pop, from metal to traditional music, taking in polka and cumbia along the way), and more generally as a way to broaden one's horizons... and finally, why not, also as a chance to encounter once again giants already celebrated on OndaRock, from Mexico's Caifanes to Poland's Maanam, from Russia's Kino to France's Indochine.

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24/02/2026