Metallica – 72 Seasons review

When you’re as big as Metallica – hundreds of millions of album sales big, tours grossing tens of millions of dollars big – there are always options. These would include giving up on releasing new material at all to concentrate on the very lucrative stadium circuit, rehashing their old material in endless souvenir editions, or simply taking up golf.

Whilst some of that might be on the table in the future, through over forty years in the business the quartet have shown a determination to stay true to the nominal purity of the write/record/release process, even if this, their eleventh album 72 Seasons is the first since 2016’s Hardwired..To Self Destruct.

The title takes inspiration from the first eighteen years of life, after which a fully formed adult is meant to have taken shape. Hetfield has used his tarnished memories of that, the pandemic and his own personal struggle with addiction to approach lyric writing, such that many of these songs come over as confessing one sin or another – but the music that accompanies the words is very much trademark Metallica.

As such, 72 Seasons is indisputably an outing for the initiated, in some ways a series of private letters from the singer to the band’s army of fans. Despite all this implied weight though some of it is fun, particularly the thrash of Lux Æterna (Ignore the haters), the title track’s familiar grind and the tongue in cheek Sabbathisms of You Must Burn! It’s true that it’s also staggeringly long at seventy-seven minutes, but then not many people complained when the last Kendrick album was even more of an endurance contest than that. For the moment, it looks like the golf buggy can wait.

You can read a full review here.