Kirk Hammett has lent his voice to one of horror’s most famous poems. The Metallica guitarist has shared ‘Kirk Hammett Presents The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe’ on the band’s YouTube channel, a reading of Edgar Allan Poe‘s 1845 poem set to ‘Inamorata’, the closing track from 2023’s ’72 Seasons’.
The video arrives just before Halloween with a simple invitation: “Pour something dark, turn the lights down, and listen.” First published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845, Poe’s poem follows a grieving man visited by a raven that answers every question with a single word: “Nevermore.”
The choice will not surprise anyone who knows Hammett. He has spent decades building one of the best-known private collections of horror film art and artefacts. Among his favourite pieces are Boris Karloff‘s costume from ‘The Black Cat’ (1933), parts of the original ‘Frankenstein’ lab and the axe Jack Nicholson swung in ‘The Shining’. He recently added the Dracula cape Bela Lugosi wore in ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’, bought at auction.
“Heavy metal and horror movies come from the same sources,” Hammett has said. In a 2022 interview with Gibson, he recalled that ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ (1974) truly scared him growing up, and that ‘The Exorcist’ hit hard for a Catholic kid: “I thought the perpetrators of that film were coming after me next.”
The collection has left his house more than once. In 2012 he published ‘Too Much Horror Business’, a coffee-table book of his memorabilia, and showed it as “Kirk’s Crypt” at the Orion Music + More festival in 2012 and 2013. He hosted his own horror convention, Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil, in 2014 and 2015, and in 2017 the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, opened ‘It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection’, with 135 works, including 84 posters and eight guitars.
The reading comes in the middle of Metallica’s ‘Life Burns Faster’ residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, which began on 1 October and runs until 13 March 2027. This week, the band play on Thursday 29 October and on Halloween night. After that, the ‘M72 World Tour’ continues with 12 North American stadium dates between 8 May and 19 June 2027, with Limp Bizkit and Avatar in support.
UK fans last saw the band this summer, when the European leg of ‘M72’ visited Hampden Park in Glasgow on 25 June, Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on 28 June and London on 3 and 5 July. No UK dates have been announced for 2027.
‘Inamorata’ is the longest song on ’72 Seasons’, Metallica’s 11th studio album, released in April 2023. The band, completed by James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Robert Trujillo, have not announced a new album.