Say what you like about Metallica (they’re very loud and can’t hear you), but there is no denying that the world’s biggest heavy metal band have never lost their ability to make an impact. Today they have released the first song from their long-awaited 10th studio album, Hardwired … to Self-Destruct, due in November. As has long been the case, the metal world is once again embroiled in arguments about whether or not Metallica have lost, regained or recklessly jettisoned the plot. Partly this inevitable eruption of opinions – both positive and less so – is because Metallica remain incomparably huge, with only Iron Maiden and Slipknot coming remotely close to their global status. But it’s also down to a widely held belief that James Hetfield and co haven’t made a genuinely great album in 25 years. As a consequence, every new music they make is subjected to intense scrutiny and compared to the seminal and legendary records the band made in the 1980s. The eight years since the release of Metallica’s last studio album, Death Magnetic, have only heightened the anticipation for new songs.
The band’s audience seems to be roughly divided between those who love everything they do and those who have despaired over recent nonsense such as Lulu – a virtually unlistenable collaboration with Lou Reed – and the hapless concert film Metallica: Through the Never. The new single, Hardwired, may not delight all fans, but it does at least suggest that Metallica have ironed out one or two problems. Specifically, the song is just over three minutes long and goes like the clappers from start to finish. This, long-suffering fans may argue, is what the band should have done on their last album, rather than forgetting how to edit their own material – resulting in anonymous, rambling dreck like the 10-minute instrumental Suicide & Redemption, instead of songs to rival old classics such as Whiplash and Battery. Hardwired is unlikely to become as loved as those early anthems, but the band do sound like a powerful heavy metal band at full throttle. The lyrics are a bit feeble, mirroring the clumsy angst and faux rebellion that has marred every Metallica album since Load in 1996, and too much mediocre water has travelled under this band’s bridge for the song’s title to be anything more than a handy slogan to imply edginess of some kind. But none of that really matters when the riffs are this sharp and brutal, the arrangement so neatly to-the-point and the band’s individual performances so unfussy and precise. (Which also raises the question: has Lars Ulrich been practising his drums for once?)
In most respects, Hardwired is the best thing Metallica have released in a long time. Unfortunately, the forthcoming album will be a two-disc, 80-minute monster with only 12 tracks. This means some very long songs – something Metallica haven’t pulled off with any success in almost three decades. That news also means that Hardwired itself is something of a diversionary tactic. Most fans would explode with delight if the band released an album of 10 short, fast and furious songs, and preferably produced by someone with a faint clue about how metal records sound in the 21st century. Eighty minutes of meandering, half-hearted toss like the execrable Lords of Summer – a stand-alone tune released in 2014 – is not an appealing prospect, particularly if Metallica have stuck with the inexplicably inelegant and misguided production they applied to 2003’s St Anger and Death Magnetic.
So, as ever, we cross our fingers and hope that Hardwired is no false dawn and that Metallica’s 10th album will be something approaching a genuine modern classic. Let’s face it, every metal fan on the planet will want to hear it anyway.
