Metallica Turns Album Covers Into Immersive Giants at Sphere

Metallica opened their Life Burns Faster residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas on Thursday night with the biggest canvas of their career: a 160,000-square-foot screen that stretches 240 feet into the air. They used every inch of it.

The band built immersive, near-3-D animations from three of their most iconic album covers — Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and … And Justice for All — performing each record's title song as the artwork expanded across the dome.

The first cover to come alive was the broken Lady Justice statue from the 1988 double LP … And Justice for All. Fans know the figure as "Doris." Because the title song runs nearly ten minutes on the album, the group built the animation slowly, opening inside the "Halls of Justice" that frontman James Hetfield sings about before arriving at the statue's base.

Rendered at the quality of a high-end video game, the scene reveals Doris at the center of a cylindrical jail, silhouetted prisoners peering out from behind bars — a look Rolling Stone likened to Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock" performance, a fitting nod to the King of Vegas residencies. A courtroom splattered in neon green paint, matching the album cover, appears, and a gavel crashes out from behind the judge's bench. A jailbreak follows. The prisoners gather at the statue's base and pull at ropes until it crumbles — with a force that felt, to those in the room, as if it might come down on the audience.

A few songs later, the band reworked the sleeve of 1984's Ride the Lightning with a twist. Guitarist Kirk Hammett found the title in Stephen King's novel The Stand, as he told Rolling Stone in 2014. "There was this one passage where this guy was on death row said he was waiting to 'ride the lightning,'" he said, inspiring the electric chair motif. At the Sphere, the audience rides the lightning: two wooden armrests flank the crowd, and an electrode cap hovers overhead, ready to electrify everyone, while lightning flashes across the dome.

The night's performance of Ride the Lightning's "The Call of Ktulu" offered another standout, with visuals showing H.P. Lovecraft's monster rising out of the ocean and ransacking Las Vegas.

The concert closed with the cover of 1986's Master of Puppets, painted by illustrator Don Brautigam, in which hands holding marionette strings reach down toward cross headstones of slain soldiers. At the Sphere, the headstones stretched for what looked like miles as they crept up the dome's screens. When the camera zoomed in, the band members appeared on the crosses. Then the whole image flipped upside down, and the soldier's helmet stashed on the left side of the cover fell off. Eventually all the crosses started falling — look up, and you could see holes where crosses had gone missing as the group raged on.

Thursday's show was the first of 24 concerts Metallica will play at the Sphere under the Life Burns Faster banner, a title taken from a lyric in "Master of Puppets." The concerts come in two-night couplings, with unique set lists each evening. The opening night leaned on the Black Album and Ride the Lightning, stacking fan favorites including "Creeping Death" and "Sad but True" alongside the three title tracks. Hits such as "Enter Sandman," "One" and "Fade to Black" remain unplayed ahead of Saturday's second gig — and with residency dates booked through March, the band has ample room to keep rearranging the show.

Set list, opening night: "Battery," "Creeping Death," "Now That We're Dead," "Sad but True," "The Shortest Straw," "Wherever I May Roam," "The Day That Never Comes," "… And Justice for All," a Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo "Doodle," "Nothing Else Matters," "The Call of Ktulu," "Lux Æterna," "Ride the Lightning," "The Memory Remains," "Seek & Destroy," "Master of Puppets."