Jokowi, who made the time as Jakarta governor to attend a Metallica concert at the Bung Karno Sports Complex in August 2013, said the new generation of fans should celebrate the metal band’s music and that the new interest in "Master of Puppets" was proof that Metallica remained one of the best in the business.

"There's no one like them, and as far as I know, there's no band from the new generation that can write music as good as theirs," President Jokowi said, responding to a question from The Jakarta Post at the Presidential Palace on Wednesday.

Jokowi said Metallica, Megadeth, Lamb of God, Slayer and Napalm Death were part of a golden generation of metal bands whose music would continue to resonate with new audiences.

"I don't hear much from new music today, the kind of music that they play. But again, I don't listen to much new music these days," he said.

"Master of Puppets" was used in the climactic finale of Stranger Things, in which one of the show’s protagonists, Eddie Munson, plays the song on his electric guitar. After the episode was released, a number of fans sought out the 36-year-old metal anthem on music streaming services.

In the week after the episode premiered, on-demand streams of the 1986 metal classic were up 650.3 percent, according to Luminate, which collates data for the Billboard charts.

The week before, “Master of Puppets” had been streamed 1,020,333 times. That figure grew to 7,655,536 in the six days after the Stranger Things episode was released.

Metallica responded to the renewed interest by issuing a statement praising Stranger Things producers the Duffer brothers for their decision to include "Master of Puppets".

"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," Metallica wrote in a statement.

On Wednesday, when asked if he had watched the Netflix series or the part where "Master of Puppets" was played, Jokowi declined to answer, saying only that he preferred watching live metal concerts.

"My last concert was that of Lamb of God in Singapore. Since then I haven't been to any," Jokowi said. 

In 2014, soon after Jokowi's election as President for his first term, Lamb of God lead singer Randy Blythe called the former mayor of Surakarta, Central Java, the “first heavy metal president in the world”. 

“Incredibly, ladies and gentlemen, the new president of Indonesia is a metalhead and a Lamb of God fan. Yes, he digs Napalm Death, Metallica, Megadeth and Lamb of God among others. Holy c#*p! The world's first heavy metal president,” Blythe wrote in a July 2014 social media post.

In November 2017, aware that President Joko "Jokowi was an ardent fan of heavy metal, visiting Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen gave him a box set of the Master of Puppets album during a bilateral meeting at Bogor Palace.

"Prime Minister Rasmussen understands my favorite [music],” Jokowi said with a wide smile as he received the two-volume box set, which contained the original eight tracks of the album, including the title track, alongside unreleased demos, mixes and live recordings.

In some photos of the box set, one volume bears the signature of Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who was born in Denmark and moved to Los Angeles at the age of 16.