If you’re reading the drum tab carefully you’ll notice something odd (you may even hear it; it’s what makes this riff sound so “off” on the record.
At the end of the second time through the riff, Lars comes in on the kick/crash one 16th note early.
Now, if this was deliberate then we may perhaps owe the excitable wee Dane an apology for all the years of sledging him for his timing…
This one dropped 16th note in his pattern does 2 things:
1 – it throws the riff off center making, disorieting the listener, forcing us to stop and consider what we’re hearing and feeling and
2 – it slips the rest of Lars’ pattern backwards by one 16th note (without losing the regularity of the kick/snare backbeat) meaning that when he gets to the end of the whole thing and twats the hell out of his China twice, the very next note he plays is the downbeat for the verse.
This is either a very happy accident or Lars is actually a genius… I’ll leave that up to you…