Metallica Raise Hell Again

Bassist Robert Trujillo on the heavy metallers’ blazing new album, high ambitions, and why they'll never get old.

- Anurag Tagat

They’re just a few hours away from kicking off their first show of the new year in Asia at Beijing’s Le Sports Center in China, and it seems like we’ve caught Metallica at their playful peak before the gig. The American metal legends’ bassist Robert Trujillo is talking about what they’ve done differently on their 10th studio album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct (released in India by Universal Music India in November 2016) when drummer Lars Ulrich shouts loud enough to be heard over the phone, “Pedal to the metal!” Guitarist Kirk Hammett completes the sentence, “... and let it roll!” as he tries to pass on half a pancake to Trujillo, who is in splits by now. The bassist says, “He was offering me a bad pancake. I had to turn it down, because that’s the bad pancake.”

Trujillo never really got around to answer what Metallica—a band whose name has become exactly as synonymous with heavy music as they wanted when they burst out in a vapid hair metal scene of the Eighties in Los Angeles – did differently on Hardwired… to Self-Destruct. But we can suppose that it was more of a return to an angrier, relentless brand of thrash metal that recalls seminal works such as … And Justice For All (1988) and Metallica (1991). Trujillo classifies it as a “fun” record for the band, who spent nearly five years working with the likes of super producer Rick Rubin and recording engineer Greg Fidelman (Black Sabbath’s 13 and Lulu, Metallica’s own weird project with the late great Lou Reed in 2011). The bassist adds, “It feels like Death Magnetic was sort of a launchpad and this is the second phase of the journey.”