Hey so there’s a new Metallica album. And you wouldn’t know it given how little press they’ve gotten for the past six months. It’s a two-disc thing, with disc 1 coming in at 37 minutes and disc 2 at 40 minutes or so. I’m not sure if I can get behind an album being almost as long as some feature-length films. Trim it down. Kill Em All was a tight 51 minutes, Number of the Beast came in at 44.

Anyway, the album starts off strong and then falls off the rails a bit. I saw a great description that seems pretty apt: This album is like the bastard child of The Black Album and Load with some Justice sprinkled in for good measure.

Disc 1

This one has most of the singles they released in anticipation, and I’ve talked about a few of them in previous Friday Morning Metals. The disc starts with Hardwired, a swift kick to the face of a thrash track. Atlas, Rise! has a Master of Puppets and/or Black Album feel, not quite as frenetic but still a well put together track.

Now That We’re Dead has some very heavy Enter Sandman vibes to it, with heavy drums and a chuggy intro. It’s also a solid 90 seconds before vocals kick in, making for a 7 minute song with a lot of riff repetition. If they cut it down to maybe 4 minutes, that’d be great.

Dream No More. What can I say about Dream No More? I kept waiting for it to kick into gear. Kinda like a song off Load or the Black Album, it’s alright I guess. But the intro kept building to what I assume would be a quick break and then double kick for days, and it never happened. Halo on Fire sort of runs the same Black Album/Load era sound. It’s also 8 and a quarter minutes long.

Disc 2

Disc 2 kicks off with Confusion and its strong march rhythm, that feels like it’s going to hit a break and go into some sort of double kick thrash master session. Instead it stays with the slower rhythm chug kind of reminiscent of Eye of the Beholder.

Manunkind starts off with some plinky plunky acoustic guitar stuff, almost like Dance of the Dead from Maiden. Then kicks into chunky chuggy riffs and big fat drums. It’s a solid rollicking hard rock sound. More like ReLoad than their older stuff.

Am I Savage? Has some of the same slow chug as the other songs on the second disc. Borderline doom metal stuff. Same goes for Murder One.

Oh and then Spit out the Bone, the final track. This is Kill Em All era Metallica right here. Machine gun drumming, crazy riffs, it feels like the ice cream you get after eating all your vegetables. That’s right, the rest of Disc 2 is summer squash and carrots and boiled spinach.

At the end of the world

Hardwired to Self Destruct feels like an uneven love letter to a bygone Metallica. Most of the tracks have drum fills, riffs, or distortion effects that were heavily used in previous albums, mostly pre-Black Album stuff. I remember reading that they were going through their older albums during a remaster or something and wanted to get back to that sound, but I didn’t realize that meant mimicking it. Thankfully, that older sound is phenomenal so even if it’s a straight lifting it’s still great. The slower songs aren’t really my jam, and they have a much closer sound to Black Album & Load.

Regarding song length, I understand that Metallica’s songs usually run long, but the average track in this is nearly 6 and a half minutes long. Even cutting a minute off each turns this into a slightly over an hour long album and stuffs it onto one disc. And for some of them, that merely means removing the same riff that was used a whole lot. Hell, cut the second disc aside from Spit out the Bone and stuff that song onto the first disc, now you have an album.

The first three tracks they released as singles were definitely my favorites of the album, and I can see why they’d put those first, as the rest of the album is pretty alright, but not lose your shit amazing. If you celebrate Metallica’s entire catalog, this is a great addition. If you’re a fan of recent stuff, it’s a great addition. If you like pre-Black Album Metallica, there are great parts but it’s otherwise yet another post Black Album… well… album.

Here’s Dream No More: