The day Metallica dropped Lux Æterna, Lars Ulrich couldn’t help himself. He had to look at what people were saying about it online.
His curiosity was understandable. Released with zero warning on November 28, 2022, Lux Æterna was the first brand new Metallica song in six years, and a taster for their upcoming 11th album, 72 Seasons. Big news by any measure, and Lars knew people would have opinions on it because everybody has an opinion on everything Metallica ever do. And they’re not always positive.
“If you decide to go down into the comment sections, at least for me, you have to prepare yourself for not taking any of it overly personally,” says Lars today. “You have to kind of remove yourself from it. But I’d like to challenge anybody in a band to say they don’t look at comments.” And so the co-founder and drummer of the world’s biggest metal band braced himself for a look into the bear-pit that is the internet to see what people thought of the song.
“I mean, I’m not sitting up until four o’clock in the morning scrolling through every one,” he says. “But when you haven’t put any music out in five or six years and you dump something like Lux Æterna on an unsuspecting world, you’re going to want to see what the feedback is.”
As it turned out, that feedback was largely positive and rightly so. Lux Æterna was three-and-a-half minutes of joyous exhilaration, a world away from the knotty complexity of 2008’s Death Magnetic and the extended power-flex of 2016’s Hardwired… To Self-Destruct. That it seemed to be a throwback to their debut album, Kill ’Em All, or even the earlier New Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement, only stacked things further in its favour (this is a comparison Lars has issues with, but more on that later).
Two more defiantly forward-facing singles have followed since then: the raging and the self-lacerating The gleaming, perfectly tuned Metallica machine, which in the last couple of years has been idling in the background while the band themselves focused on writing, recording and generally dealing with a global pandemic, is roaring