10 Greatest Rock Bands With Two Guitar Players
1. Metallica
After Black Sabbath and Judas Priest brought us to something heavy in the '70s, metal was finally starting to grow up in the next decade, While some of the pretty boys out of Los Angeles were making songs that felt like the sell out version of metal, there was something brewing underneath called thrash, taking the speed and intensity of punk and blending it with the sounds of metal. Music like this was supposed to live in the underground, but James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett turned these punishing riffs into an entire empire.
Even with all of the memes that have been made at Kirk's expense as of late because of his fixation on his wah wah pedal, there's a lot more character in his playing than just a wall of noise, bringing an element of blues into the mix with some of the more soulful guitar breaks that happen on a song like One, almost combining the sounds of Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix together under one roof. If you were talking precision though, James Hetfield might be the most accomplished rhythm player in the world, never letting up on his downpicking and also putting together some of the band's more melodic harmony lines like the middle section of Master of Puppets and most of Nothing Else Matters.
Most musicians struggle their entire lives to try and find some sort of style that will fit their aesthetic, but Metallica were never about trying to fit in with the times when they were starting out. This was the sound of pure guitar playing, and no amount of trends could ever get in the way of that.