METALLICA ARE WELL AND TRULY BACK.
A lot has changed with the world in the seven years since Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, though thankfully there are some things you can always count on. From James Hetfield’s furious downpicking and Lars Ulrich’s thunderous grooves to Kirk Hammett’s wailing leads and Robert Trujillo’s earth-conquering bass, Metallica’s latest studio album, 72 Seasons, is as reassuring as it gets, offering everything you could possibly want from a modern Metallica record — and perhaps even standing as their finest release since 1991’s Metallica, aka the Black Album.
A lot of it will feel familiar in the way many fans will have hoped, though it’s the creative surprises and unexpected detours that make album number 11 such a standout, cross-pollinating ideas and splicing riffs in ways few could have ever guessed. For a band who have been accused of being perhaps a little too predictable at times — which, let’s not forget, is natural after four decades of game-changing and trendsetting music — this is the sound of Metallica showing us they’re the masters of their own destiny.
Our first taste arrived late last year in the form of “Lux Æterna,” the lead single on which the quartet sounded fiercely re-energized and reinvigorated in ways that harked back to the earliest recordings committed to tape not long after their teens. Its successor, “Screaming Suicide,” which arrived two months later, was a more bluesy affair that nodded to the early metal bands that helped ignite the fuse for the thrash movement, from Judas Priest and Diamond Head to Iron Maiden. And then in March they unveiled brooding epic “If Darkness Had a Son” — a neck-thickening display of mid-tempo triplets on the low E string, palm-muted chromatic ideas that creep and crawl their way around the lower frets and turbo-charged blues licks that scream over smoldering rhythms. Speaking to Guitar World a few months ahead of the album’s release, Kirk Hammett explains why Metallica are sounding more pissed off, defiant and inventive than they have in a long time.
“A lot of creativity came from being angry from with general fuckin’ state of the world,” he says, calling from his home in Hawaii. “All that stuff definitely worked its way into the music. I think this album would have sounded a lot different if we didn’t have the pandemic. I don’t know exactly how, but I guarantee it would have sounded different. People sometimes say, ‘Oh yeah, Metallica, they’re getting older, they’re losing their way, their lifestyles are overtaking them’ or whatever! You know, it’s really easy to say all that stuff. But a person is not completely what they are in that single moment...”
He pauses for a moment, before hitting the nail on the head.
“That 18-year-old Kirk is in me,” he says. “The 25-year-old Kirk is still in me. The 45-year-old Kirk is still in me, same as the 55-year-old me. I’m 60 now, but I feel like I can access any of those ages pretty easily, and even other versions that haven’t even appeared yet. Most people, if they think about it,] There’s a lot that goes into the music that isn’t even musical. A lot of it is pure creativity, intention and consciousness. That’s what I believe. And if this all sounds like a bunch of fuckin’ crockery, I don’t really care… this is where my mind is at right now.
