Metallica Share Official Video of "The Call of Ktulu" From Their Sphere Opening Night

LAS VEGAS

Some songs were built for arenas. The Call of Ktulu was built for the end of the world — and on October 1, Metallica finally got to play it inside a room that looks like one. The band has now shared the official video of that performance, filmed on the opening night of its Life Burns Faster residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, and it is the clearest look yet at what happens when the biggest metal band on the planet meets the most futuristic concert room ever built. Blabbermouth reported the video's release on Thursday, October 15, and Brave Words carried the same official clip the same day — an instrumental, nearly nine minutes of it in its album form, played under a 16K sky that can turn into anything the band imagines.

First, the choice of song is the story. The Call of Ktulu is the closing instrumental from 1984's Ride the Lightning, a brooding, orchestral piece of thrash that longtime fans treat with something close to reverence — and it carries the fingerprints of two departed pieces of Metallica history, since it grew out of ideas from the band's earliest lineup and was arranged with bassist Cliff Burton's classical instincts all over it. On opening night at Sphere, the band dedicated the performance to Burton, as The Rock Revival reported in its setlist coverage: frontman James Hetfield honored their fallen brother onstage, days after the 40th anniversary of Burton's death in a tour bus accident on September 27, 1986. That is why this clip, of all the songs from a 16-song opening set, is the one the band chose to put out officially. It is not the hit. It is the heirloom.

The opening show itself was no tentative first step. The Rock Revival and Consequence both documented a 16-song set that opened with Battery — a Master of Puppets charge in the year that album turned 40 — and dug deep: "The Shortest Straw," "Ride the Lightning," and the title track of …And Justice for All, played for the first time since 2014. Coverage of the night described visuals matched to the music across Sphere's wraparound screen, including a giant sea creature for the Ktulu instrumental, swatting at jets while the band played beneath it. If you are going to summon an ancient god in song, doing it under a screen that wraps up, over and around 17,600 people is the way to do it. Consequence noted the set drew from across the band's catalog and closed with Seek & Destroy and Master of Puppets — night one of a residency designed so that night two sounds nothing like it.

Because that is the residency's whole trick. Life Burns Faster runs 24 performances arranged as 12 "No Repeat Weekends," Blabbermouth reported — Thursday and Saturday pairs in October, November, January, February and March, with completely different setlists on the two nights and no song repeated within a weekend. The format mirrors the band's M72 world tour, which has played to more than four million fans since spring 2023. The run was originally announced as eight October dates, then expanded in waves: November 5 and 7; January 28 and 30; February 4, 6, 18, 20 and 25 and 27; and March 4, 6, 11 and 13, closing March 13, 2027. And the timing of this video is not an accident: the residency continues tonight, Thursday, October 15, with the next pair of shows on October 15 and 17, followed by October 22, 24, 29 and 31, per Brave Words' listing. A fan deciding whether this is worth the trip just got handed the best possible evidence.

The venue, for anyone who has somehow missed the memo, is the point as much as the band. Sphere opened in September 2023 just off the Strip, near the Venetian and Wynn, with a 17,600 capacity, the highest-resolution LED display in the world wrapping around the audience, and a concert-grade immersive sound system powered by HOLOPLOT that aims the audio at every seat, Blabbermouth noted. U2 opened it, and Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles have all taken residencies there — but no metal band had, until Metallica. Drummer Lars Ulrich has said he was sold within seconds of seeing U2's opening night in 2023: "We have to do this," he recalled thinking. "It's completely uncharted territory." Three years on, the Ktulu video is the receipt: four musicians, one instrumental with no singer to hide behind, and a room doing half the storytelling in light.

There is a business read on this, too, and it is a happy one for Las Vegas. A 24-show residency spreads Metallica's enormous traveling audience across five months of Strip hotel rooms, restaurants and return visits, with a built-in excuse for fans to come twice — the No Repeat format means Thursday's ticket and Saturday's ticket are two different concerts. It also lands in a season when the Strip is stacking entertainment wins; across town at the Flamingo, Luke Combs' Category 10 venue opens its doors today, and you can read our coverage of that launch in today's news section. Vegas is having the kind of month that reminds everyone else why it wins.

What the video ultimately sells is restraint, oddly enough. Metallica could have led with Enter Sandman fireworks. Instead it led with an instrumental written when its members were barely out of their teens, dedicated to the bassist they lost forty years ago, performed flawlessly under a digital sea monster. That is a band utterly sure of who it is. The residency runs through March 13, 2027, the next shows are tonight and Saturday, and the catalog is deep enough that no weekend repeats itself. Ktulu has been called. Vegas answered. For more of today's entertainment coverage, browse the newsroom, and check Sports for the NLCS and the rest of the day in games, including our Brewers-Dodgers Game 3 recap.