Metallica‘s upcoming album, 72 Seasons, opens with its seven-and-a-half-minute title track, and its release today (March 30) sets the tone for a project already being described as “expansive and unrelenting.” Frontman James Hetfield sings of wrath, violence, chaos, and paralysis atop dark and heavy riffage, accented by a Tim Saccenti-directed video.
“72 seasons. The first 18 years of our lives that form our true or false selves,” Hetfield previously said of the album and its themes. “The concept that we were told ‘who we are’ by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are. I think the most interesting part of this is the continued study of those core beliefs and how it affects our perception of the world today. Much of our adult experience is a reenactment or reaction to these childhood experiences. Prisoners of childhood or breaking free of those bondages we carry.”
72 Seasons will be released on April 14, with a massive accompanying tour starting 13 days later in Amsterdam. On it, the band will play two nights in each city with completely different set lists per show. Metallica was also just confirmed for the first Power Trip festival on the Coachella and Stagecoach event site at Empire Polo Field in Indio, Ca., in early October.
The upcoming album was produced by Greg Fidelman in tandem with Hetfield and Lars Ulrich and is Metallica’s first full-length since 2016’s Hardwired … To Self-Destruct.
