Metallica back on the road with stop in Pittsburgh, returns to roots
It’s said absence makes the heart grow fonder. That seems to have been the case for Metallica.
Despite going eight years between studio albums and not doing a full-fledged tour for more than six years, Metallica may have returned more popular than at any time in the past two and a half decades with its latest album, “Hardwired … to Self Destruct.”
The album debuted at
No. 1 on the Billboard” Top 200 chart and has topped 5 million copies sold worldwide so far, an impressive — perhaps downright astonishing — showing at a time when rock artists have struggled to sell albums.
Now, Metallica didn’t totally drop out of sight after finishing its tour supporting the 2008 album, “Death Magnetic” and the release in November 2016 of “Hardwired … To Self Destruct.” There was a 2011 collaborative album with the late Lou Reed, “Lulu,” an innovative 2013 concert film/drama, “Metallica: Through The Never,” a mini-tour in 2014, and since then, a few high-profile television appearances and occasional concerts.
But clearly a lot of acts would have lost some momentum by staying off the music world grid to that extent for the better part of six years.
An emphatic return
Guitarist Kirk Hammett, though, has some thoughts about why Metallica returned so emphatically with “Hardwired … to Self Destruct.”
“I think for right now there’s a little bit of a vacuum in like us and bands that sound like us,” he said. “There are a lot of great new bands out there, but I think people yearn for something that they know is made in a real sense. I think there’s a bit of authenticity that comes with us that might not be attached to some of the more contemporary bands.
“We can be counted on to deliver in some form or another something that’s real and authentic and something that has integrity,” Hammett said. “I think that really means a lot to some people these days when a lot of music is just kind of like made by pressing a button…People can count on us showing up with our instruments and actually making music right there in the moment. And we deliver. Whatever you hear on our album, we can play live. I will not even like try to count how many bands are incapable of that. I think that’s part of it.”
The idea that Metallica stands apart on the music scene is a theme that echoed through this interview with Hammett. He noted that there has always been an outsider mentality to Metallica, and this existed from the moment in 1983 when he joined guitarist/singer James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich and late bassist Cliff Burton (he died in a 1986 bus accident on tour) in the group.
“Maybe that’s part of what drives us,” Hammett said. “That outsiderness shapes our musical thinking. I’m not going to dive into that too deeply, but I think it plays a big part in our overall attitudes and perspective.”
Certainly Metallica’s thrashy, fast-paced sound that was introduced on the 1983 album “Kill ‘Em All” was a different type of metal at the time. And while the group tightened up its song arrangements and added a dose of melody on the 1991 self-titled release (commonly known as the “Black Album”) — a move that helped the album sell 16 million copies in the United States alone — Metallica was still harder and heavier than most metal bands.
The band hasn’t softened its sound since, and if anything, “Death Magnetic” and now “Hardwired … to Self Destruct” have been seen as at least a partial return to the faster and harder early sound of Metallica.
Hammett agrees there is a return-to-roots element to “Hardwired … to Self Destruct,” and said the band has naturally gravitated to this place musically.
Integrating the new
“Certainly with ‘Death Magnetic’ we learned that it was OK to embrace our past with sort of a revisionist approach to our musical past,” he said. “That’s what ‘Death Magnetic’ kind of like started. To an extent it’s continued with this album, too. We like to play music from all of the different eras, and at this particular point in our lives, playing the heavier stuff just is appealing to us. It feels right to me and it feels right to the other guys in the band.”
The new songs are getting integrated into Metallica’s live sets, and the band is following up last year’s run of outdoor stadiums in the states with a fall/winter tour of arenas.
“It’s a lot different indoors,” Hammett said, comparing arenas to playing huge outdoor stadiums. “It’s more intimate. You have your closed off sort of atmosphere. The sound is better. You can see everyone a lot better. You can see people up in the stands. The reactions are a lot more quicker. It’s a different animal, but we enjoy — and I stress this — we enjoy playing in stadiums, we enjoy playing indoors. We enjoy playing small clubs. We enjoy it all because for us it’s all about going out there and playing the songs the best we possibly can.”
Alan Sculley is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.
