Metallica Follows Kate Bush Into Charts, Thanks Once Again To ‘Stranger Things’ Phenomenon

Where Kate Bush goes, Metallica follows… with the veteran rockers looking set to break into the UK music chart for the first time in 40 years, thanks once again to the phenomenon of Stranger Things.

The heavy metal stalwarts have seen their profile cross over from their diehard fans to a brand new mainstream audience since their Master of Puppets rock anthem provided the soundtrack for a key scene in the finale of the most recent season. Joseph Quinn’s character Eddie Munson used fretboard dynamics to distract the “demobats” in the Upside Down while dedicating the song to his murdered friend, “Chrissy, this is for you!”

In recent weeks, the song has received more than 17million streams on Spotify. As well as hovering around the UK chart, it has appeared in the US Billboard chart for the first time since it was released in 1986.

But it is on Tik Tok where the real synergy between musicians, actors and fans is evident. The band recently posted a video of themselves playing Master of Puppets, while wearing T-shirts with the logo of Eddie’s Dungeons & Dragons society, the Hellfire Club. They captioned the post “Heard any cool songs lately?” with tags including #StrangerThings and #EddieMunson. The video has to date received more than 42m views.

Despite already selling 125million albums in their 40-year career, Metallica are clearly delighted with their fresh impact. They posted on their social media:

“The way The Duffer Brothers have incorporated music into Stranger Things has always been next level, so we were beyond psyched for them to not only include Master of Puppets in the show, but to have such a pivotal scene built around it. We were all stoked to see the final result and when we did we were totally blown away.”

Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers recruited Metallica early on for the scene. The band’s guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Robert Trujillo and Trujillo’s son Tye recorded additional guitar tracks for the version of the song that appears in the show.