While James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich basically are Metallica, Kirk Hammett is just slightly above “hired gun” status in the band.
Remember the time that Kirk Hammett lost his phone and all the ideas he had for the album they were working on at the time? I don’t remember James or Lars being too devastated. Maybe there were some good ideas for songs in that phone they would have used, maybe there weren’t. Whether they would have gotten used or not wouldn’t have been Kirk’s decision!
Kirk was actually more impressive in the 1980s than he is now. Plenty of other guitar players just got better and better in that time. Not Kirk. As far as I’m concerned, he’s never topped the Hit The Lights solo. It sounds kind of like a solo Dave Mustaine would play, doesn’t it? There’s a striking resemblance in the note choices.
A lot of people like Kirk’s solo in One. I think it’s good, but it was done over 30 years ago. Not only did Kirk fail to progress, he actually regressed. St. Anger, their album without guitar solos, said a lot about what Lars and James thought of Kirk.
They’re a band that specifically hired a lead guitarist, yet they decided to have an album with no lead guitar or next to none. I’ve forgotten which. It’s so hard to remember that which isn’t memorable.
James Hetfield pretty much invented a whole new style of guitar playing: rapid downstrokes with palm muting, done with surgical precision.
Hetfield inspired a whole lot of other heavy metal guitarists to start playing thrash metal in the style that he played. Lots of them tried to play like James but none could do it quite as well as he did.
Dave Mustaine is the only other guitarist in heavy metal who could say that he’s as good as James Hetfield at rhythm guitar. In some ways Mustaine’s songs are even harder to play. I’d give Hetfield the edge in writing more riffs that ended up being classics but they’re both great players. Kirk Hammett is, at best, a good guitarist, but there’s a tremendous difference between good and great.
James is also the best singer that came from the thrash metal scene. While he’s not a singer on the level of a Dio or Halford, Hetfield is a good vocalist who can cover a good amount of musical ground. You combine his ability to sing and play guitar the way he does with his songwriting and James Hetfield is one of the most talented guys in metal.