Metallica Unleash a Thrash Storm as “Ride the Lightning” Ignites Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium in 2025
On a warm Wednesday night in Brisbane, the M72 World Tour finally crashed into Suncorp Stadium, and you could feel that this wasn’t just another big-ticket rock show. For locals, it was Metallica’s first visit to the city in over a decade, and the vibe outside felt closer to a grand final than a mid-week gig. Fans were already warmed up from days of hype around the band’s pop-up merch shop in Fortitude Valley, where people queued for hours to grab limited Ride the Lightning skateboards and 72 Seasons vinyl before the gates even opened.
Inside the stadium, the transformation from rugby fortress to metal cathedral felt complete the moment AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” rolled out over the PA. It was a perfectly cheeky nod to Australian rock heritage and a tradition Metallica has embraced on this leg of the tour. The song bled seamlessly into Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold,” the band’s long-standing walk-on anthem, and as those familiar strings swelled, you could see entire sections of the crowd raise their phones, bouncing in anticipation for the four silhouettes about to stride onstage.
They opened by going straight for the throat: “Creeping Death” as the first full song is Metallica in attack mode. Brisbane roared back the “Die! Die! Die!” chant like they’d been rehearsing for weeks, and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” stomped in right behind it, turning the lower stands into a synchronized headbanging class. The sound in Suncorp was surprisingly tight for a stadium—Hetfield’s bark cut through clearly, Ulrich’s snare popped without getting lost in echo, and Robert Trujillo’s bass rumbled underfoot in a way that made every tom hit feel like a body-shot.
By the time “Fuel” detonated—flames bursting from the stage towers as the chorus crashed down—Brisbane had crossed the line from excited to feral. It was only then, three songs into the main set, that the structure of the night really clicked: this was a carefully paced sprint through nearly every era of the band’s catalogue, but with one key twist. Where some cities on the tour had been getting “The Memory Remains” early in the set, Brisbane was about to be gifted something rarer and far more dangerous: “Ride the Lightning” as the fourth full-band song of the night.
When the intro to “Ride the Lightning” finally snarled out of the PA, there was this split-second gasp from parts of the crowd—like thousands of people realizing at the same time that they’d just hit the jackpot. Fans who had been doomscrolling setlists from other Australian shows knew how special it was; one online comment earlier in the day had literally written, “If Brisbane gets ‘Ride’ instead of ‘Memory’ I’ll lose my mind.” That’s exactly what happened in real time: pits opened, fists went up, and suddenly Suncorp felt ten degrees hotter as the song’s galloping main riff took off.
The performance itself felt like a love letter to the band’s thrash roots. Hetfield leaned into the verses with that clipped, snarling cadence he’s honed over forty-plus years, stretching out syllables just enough to sound menacing without losing speed. Kirk Hammett’s lead runs snaked around the rhythm guitars, messy in that gloriously human way the old records captured but with the precision of a veteran who’s played this song on every continent. Trujillo locked in on the triplets with a thick, grinding tone that made every palm-muted chug feel like the stadium was physically shaking, while Ulrich—often criticized online—sounded laser-focused, driving the mid-tempo thrash sections like a drummer with something to prove.
Visually, “Ride the Lightning” was one of the night’s high-water marks. While the M72 stage design has been consistent all tour, there was something fitting about watching those towering screens flash storm clouds, electric blues, and prison bars over a Queensland sky that had only just gone fully dark. The circular layout of the M72 stage—set in the round so the band is surrounded on all sides—meant every section of the stadium got its own “front row” moment as the cameras swung around and the band rotated positions. When the song broke into its instrumental mid-section, the lights strobed in icy blues and whites, mimicking lightning strikes as Hammett’s solo tore through the night air.
Lyrically, “Ride the Lightning” has always been one of Metallica’s most unsettling pieces—a young band grappling with capital punishment and existential terror—and hearing tens of thousands of people shout along in 2025 gave it a different weight. The line “Guilty as charged, but damn it, it ain’t right” rang out with eerie clarity, bouncing off the stadium’s upper tiers. It’s one thing to absorb that kind of subject matter alone through headphones; it’s another to hear it roared collectively by an audience that spans three or four generations, all compressing their anxieties into the same chorus in a city that hasn’t seen them since before many of those fans had kids of their own.
Part of what made the song land so hard in Brisbane was its placement between different emotional poles of the set. After that breathless barrage of early thrash, the band pivoted into “The Unforgiven” and “Wherever I May Roam,” letting the crowd sink into more mid-tempo, melodic territory without ever letting the energy truly dip. That contrast made “Ride the Lightning” feel like the night’s turning point—the moment where the show stopped just being a victory lap for a veteran band and became something more dangerous, unpredictable, and alive. It was as if they’d slipped a club-era setlist item into a stadium-scale production and dared Brisbane to keep up.
The fun didn’t stop with the deep cuts. In classic M72 fashion, the mid-set “Kirk and Rob doodle” turned into a local in-joke, as the guitarist and bassist broke into a bit of “Smoko” by Aussie punk upstarts The Chats. It was a tiny moment on paper, but it really cemented how tuned-in the band is to each city they visit on this run. You could see people in the stands laughing, shouting the lyrics, or pulling out their phones to text friends something along the lines of, “They’re playing bloody ‘Smoko’ at Suncorp.”
From there, the back half of the set played like a curated “best of modern Metallica” reel. “The Day That Never Comes” unfurled slowly, its clean intro drifting over a sea of phone lights before exploding into that machine-gun ending. “Moth Into Flame” and “Sad But True” locked together as a groove-heavy one-two punch, giving Trujillo plenty of room to stomp across the runway and coax roars out of each quadrant of the stadium. Even the fans who had come primarily for the old-school material found themselves shouting along to the more recent tracks, proof that the newer albums have sunk much deeper into the collective psyche than some online discourse might suggest.
Of course, the emotional centre of almost any Metallica show these days is “Nothing Else Matters,” and Brisbane was no exception. After the intensity of “Ride the Lightning” and the crushing mid-set march, the ballad offered a kind of communal exhale. Hetfield took his time with the intro, letting the familiar arpeggios ring out as the stadium fell into a hush. Couples swayed, friends threw arms around each other’s shoulders, and fans who had been screaming themselves hoarse all night suddenly shifted into choir mode, turning the chorus into one massive, ragged but undeniably heartfelt sing-along.
Then came the endgame: “Seek & Destroy,” “Lux Æterna,” “Master of Puppets,” “One,” and “Enter Sandman” forming a closing stretch that felt almost absurd in how stacked it was. “Lux Æterna” in particular hit harder live than its studio version suggests, its NWOBHM-inspired gallop cutting straight through the night as images from the 72 Seasons era flickered across the screens. “Master of Puppets” and “One” brought the theatrics—blinding white strobes for the latter’s “machine gun” section, frantic crowd-wide clapping and chanting for the former—before “Enter Sandman” sent everyone home wrapped in the safety blanket of the world’s most famous metal lullaby.
What really distinguished Brisbane’s show from other M72 dates, though, was the feeling that the city had been waiting for this exact kind of set for a very long time. With Evanescence and Suicidal Tendencies on the bill, the evening already felt like a mini-festival: goth-soaked anthems, skate-punk energy, and then the godfathers of modern metal closing the circle. But getting “Ride the Lightning” early in the night, when other cities had to settle for slightly safer song choices, gave Suncorp a bragging right that diehards will be talking about for years.
In the online chatter that followed, that point came up again and again: fans posting photos of the setlist sheets, circling “Ride the Lightning” and captioning them with variations of “We won the lottery tonight.” Some compared the show directly to other Aussie stops, arguing that Brisbane got the thrash-heavy dream sequence while Melbourne snagged the big sing-along of “The Memory Remains.” Others simply uploaded rough phone clips of the “Ride the Lightning” breakneck mid-section and let the audio speak for itself, the sound of tens of thousands of voices howling along under the Queensland sky.
Looking at the night as a whole, it’s clear why a future-proof 4K upload of “Ride the Lightning” from Brisbane is already destined to be one of the go-to documents of this tour. It captures a band deep into its third year of a globe-straddling run, still finding ways to keep things interesting for themselves and their audience. It shows a city that turned up not just out of nostalgia but with genuine hunger, ready to scream along to songs written before many of them were born and newer ones that sound like they could have come out last week. And it underlines the simple truth that when Metallica decide to dust off a song like “Ride the Lightning” and fire it into the first third of a set, the entire character of the evening changes.
If you strip everything else away—the merch lines, the social media chatter, the pyro, the clever stage design—you’re left with something very simple at the heart of Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium show: four musicians in their 60s playing a song they wrote as angry kids and still making it feel like a live wire. That’s the magic of “Ride the Lightning” on this particular night. It wasn’t just a deep cut thrown in for the hardcore fans; it was the moment the whole evening snapped into razor-sharp focus, a reminder that for all the history and spectacle, Metallica’s greatest trick is still their ability to turn a massive stadium into one giant, electrified basement gig for eight minutes at a time.
