Ablue-skied mid-morning in Lisbon. It’s Carnival Tuesday, February 21, in the Portuguese capital and a national holiday across the country. A marching band are already striking up an imploring samba rhythm from the grand riverfront plaza, the Praca do Comercio. Lines of Mardi Gras revellers in brightly coloured costumes snake along the length of the Rua Serpa Pinto. This vaulting thoroughfare spears off the from the plaza and up the steep hill leading to the skeletal remains of the Convento do Carmo, its Gothic pillars and arches looming over the city like the carcass of a great, gutted whale.
There’s a crowd gathered at the head of the road, in the shadow of the ruined convent. In their midst a solitary musician, a busker, is picking out a weeping melody on a battered acoustic guitar. The song is better suited to the dead of a long, dark night than a street party, and at once familiar as being Nothing Else Matters. Such is Metallica’s enduring ubiquity in this, their forty-second year. Their sheer staying power is remarkable. It’s approaching 32 years since Nothing Else Matters’s parent record, Metallica, aka the
Not that the band have ever truly gone away. Last summer they played shows – festival headliners and their own stadium dates – in a handful of European cities, including Lisbon. These were trailblazers for November’s clarion-call single Lux Aeterna. Two more new songs – Screaming Suicide and If Darkness Had A Son – have followed already this year. They are precursors to the release this month of 72 Seasons, the first Metallica studio album since Hardwired… To Self-Destruct back in 2016. What’s more, this rush of activity has chimed with the band attaining a level of hipness without precedent in all the rest of their 125-millionrecords-sold-and-counting time together.
Put another way, Metallica are riding the wave of the effect. More accurately, the grandstanding moment in season four’s finale episode when Hellfire Club metalhead Eddie Munson cranked out from the roof of his trailer in the Upside Down. It was, in fact, Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo’s 18-year-old son, Tye, playing the re-recorded riff (the young Trujillo’s third-grade teacher happens to be married to one of the show’s producers). Tye Trujillo recorded his
