Lars Ulrich on the rock album that “blew away” genre division

In the world of heavy music, Metallica have gone a long way in breaking down the walls. Even though they’d be categorised as a heavy metal act, the American group have fostered a fan base that stretches way beyond the typical genre crowd. As they borrow elements from softer corners of the rock landscape, their sound is a melting pot built for mass appeal. That was something done by design as Lars Ulrich shared his love for another pioneering record.

People often get strange about heavier rock. It feels like an impenetrable world and an intimidating one at that. Metal fans have earned an unfair reputation, painting them out as unapproachable and sanctimonious, looking down on anything with a slightly lower decibel rating. They’re seen as purists who wouldn’t tolerate any straying from loud, wild tradition. But that’s not the truth of the matter.

For proof of that, Metallica stands as a shiny example. After their formation in 1981, the group have been twisting tradition ever since. Their fast tempos and loud sound quickly established them as one of the biggest thrash bands on earth, but when listening to songs like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ or ‘The Unforgiven’, the softer, more balladic sound is something very different. While obviously loving to play huge, thumping metal tracks, the band clearly also borrow from classic rock and roll or more gentle sides of the wider genre.

That ability to go beyond the boundaries and cast off any constraints is something the band’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, clearly looks for in his own music taste, too. When picking out the five albums he couldn’t live without, he granted one spot to a record he saw as pioneering and genre-expanding, helping to wave the way for his own band.

“The one thing that was different about Motörhead was that they united people from all these different genres,” said Ulrich, talking about the British rock band led by Lemmy Kilmister. In particular, he picked out their 1981 live album No Sleep ’til Hammersmith as a particularly important one.

“Back in 1980, the music world was way more segregated than it is now,” he said, talking about the ways in which genre didn’t just define music but whole sections of society and subcultures. “So if you were a heavy metal guy there was a particular look, a uniform. If you were a punk kid it was the same, or an alternative kid, if you liked Joy Division or whatever. Everything was very segregated, especially in England,” he explained.

But he’d argue that Motörhead made major steps to do away with those divisions and unite rival tribes. “All these punks, skinheads, alternative kids and metal kids… fucking everybody loved Motörhead. In a time of division and segregation and ‘Fuck you, you can’t be in my gang’ and ‘I don’t wanna be in your gang’ and ‘We’ll beat each other up, football hooligan-style’, Motörhead were the first band to really unite fans across all these different genres,” he said.

He attributes all of that to their melting pot sound, combining heavier elements with more accessible classic rock details. The band plucked whatever they wanted from the various subcultures and sounds around them, making a record that everyone could get into and destroying the lines between them.

“They blew away all that division,” Ulrich said, “That’s an important piece to remember in the story of Motörhead.”