Metallica’s last album Death Magnetic was released back in 2008 and considering their usual 5 year cycle between each of their releases, we haven’t received any new music in a while (because we refuse to acknowledge Lulu as “music), but after some time, the question now is, do we want it?
Going back to all the times we have written about Metallica’s new album, I realized how much of a tedious chore it is to see what bits and pieces of information have come out since people started wondering what’s going on with Metallica. Since they were boasting about having over 1,200 riffs ready to be used on the new record just to lose a good chunk of them when misplacing an iPhone, this has become more of a playful tease than actual expectations.
Drummer Lars Ulrich recently spoke with Metal Forces and he mentioned the plans to finish their new album this summer and hopefully releasing it later on this year:
“The month of June is basically when we’re gonna sit down and figure what we’re gonna do with it all; what we’re gonna call it and what’s gonna be on it … Greg Fidelman is 24/7 on this record and has been since last summer. He’s doing an insanely great job and has been putting his heart and soul in it pretty much every waking moment of his life in helping us engineer and produce this record.”
Considering they’ve been saying to be working on the new album since 2014 after the release of their single “Lords of Summer,” we can say that timeline seems to be right. Except that he still can’t confirm what day or even season we’re going to get it once done, as he later elaborated:
“If the record doesn’t come out this year, then it won’t be because it’s not done. It will be because there’s some sort of cosmic reason that it would be smarter to hold onto it until next year. But the record will be done this summer.”
You must be wondering why Metallica isn’t in such a rush to release a record they’ve been working on for this long, but we basically said it before but we’ll say it again: They don’t have to. Since they started revisiting their back catalog in the form of the newest boxsets and considering how much money they make even from a single show, they haven’t really needed to put out any new music.
While Death Magnetic was fairly well received and sold steadily for the few first years it was out, we believe Metallica isn’t too eager to put out new music since they’ve done just fine without it. In all fairness to them, they proved to have some new music for us after Papa Het shared this snippet, but unless this becomes the biggest album of all time, we really can’t see why it’s taking this long.
At this point, whatever new music we get either later this year or next year, I can’t be sure if I’m excited about it for any more reason than just simple curiosity as to why it’s taking this long. I could have the same argument about Tool’s non-existent new album but between Tool milking fans’ nostalgia and one of the biggest metal bands in the world that at least have given their fans a new song, the bar is set higher for Metallica.
Let’s see what we actually get once this is out, meanwhile, let’s just keep throwing money at them to catch them live whenever we have the chance, just like we did right here.
