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Metallica’s Kirk Hammett got a good dose of “karma” on Friday: The guitarist slipped off the stage in the middle of the concert – days after wearing a shirt that enraged Taylor Swift fans.
At the Metallica concert in Budapest on June 13, Hammett appeared wearing a shirt that read “Taylor Swift Is a CIA Psyop.” Photos of the guitarist in the track quickly made the rounds, drawing the ire of Swifties, who lashed out at him on Reddit and social media.
Kirk Hammett from the has-been band Metallica was wearing a “Taylor Swift Is a CIA Psyop” shirt on stage. pic.twitter.com/qe5URKFJKR
— Taylor Swift Fan Archive (@Taylors_Archive) June 19, 2026
It took a week, but fate caught up with Hammett: At Metallica’s performance in Dublin on June 19th, he lost his footing during “Seek & Destroy” – and fell into the audience with his guitar. The crowd helped him back onto the stage and only a few chords were lost.
Hammett jokes
Hammett himself took the fall with humor and commented on his mistake in an Instagram story with the words “Slip and Destroy!!!”. He has not yet commented on the scandal surrounding the “Psyop” shirt – nor on whether the curse of the Swifties may have had a hand in his slip-up.
Kirk Hammett’s entry into Metallica didn’t go entirely smoothly. When the guitarist decided to leave his original band Exodus in April 1983, their singer Paul Baloff was not very amused. He said dryly to Hammett, “I just can’t believe you would do something like that” – and emptied a beer glass over his head.
A “damn good” period in his guitar career
An incident with a long-term effect: After a proper shower, Hammett replaced his Metallica predecessor Dave Mustaine, who had struggled with drug problems and later founded the band Magadeath in frustration and anger. Baloff, who comes from Russia, was fired from Exodus in 1985. He died in February 2002.
In an interview with the UK edition of “Metal Hammer”, Kirk Hammett tells all sorts of anecdotes from four decades with the legendary thrash metal quartet. The question of his best all-time moments as a guitarist is also touched upon.
Instead of choosing Metallica’s boisterous, technically demanding material from the 1980s, he cites 1991’s so-called “The Black Album” (which originally had no title) as the pinnacle of his nimble achievements.
Despite initial doubts, Hammett sees this as a “damn good” period in his guitar career. His solos on “The Black Album” almost all wrote themselves. Everything would have worked out miraculously, with initial difficulties unleashing the magic of his game.
“The Unforgiven” as the highlight
“There were a few things I wasn’t prepared for, like the solo on ‘My Friend of Misery’. “The Unforgiven” also had problems at the beginning, which is pretty well documented. But at the end of “The Unforgiven” it came to me so spontaneously that I wanted to do everything that way from then on.”
