Metallica vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield appeared on 93.3 WMMR in a new interview which you can hear here. Numerous topics were covered, here’s some excerpts:
On their new album “Hardwired…To Self-Destruct” will not being entirely done:
“You can call us perfectionists, if you want, and I will too. But there’s always something. You know, ‘Ah, this is a little too long-winded. Let’s cut this out. Let’s make this a little more potent.’ You know, dude, we’re craftsmen, and we wanna make this as sharp and as potent as possible. So, you know, all the way up to the last minute—even running order. So there’s always something we’re thinking about and trying to make it the best and most potent possible. So it is, by all means, done as far as songs go. So it’s just artwork and little things here and there we’re still working on.”
He also further went onto state that the band will be doing selective touring in support of the album, which he described as being “less but smarter.”
On the ‘Kids React To Metallica Video‘:
“I love it, it is beautiful… ‘What are they like 80?’—I love that… I love the honesty of children, they got nothing to lose man, they don’t know what it is and they just tell it like it is for them. And that purity is so inspiring. I’m pretty proud of those girls too, most of the girls in there were ‘hey honestly this is not my kind of music but there’s something about it I really like’ and just really absorbing it and one gal was saying ‘hey, they’re really still playing, I guess that’s kind of cool’. It was inspiring on all fronts.”
“What I loved most was that they hadn’t heard this before, they’d never heard it before. And it was like you’re watching them be introduced to something and it was really cool. And the one kid was like ‘When’s it gonna stop?’ [laughs.] Love it, love it.”
On the haters:
“Yeah, you get different versions of it now, online, with all the haters and the people that have some bone to pick and they just,you know, whatever. They’ve got a resentment from ten years ago, and they’re bringing it up on this new album; they haven’t even heard it. It’s, like, ‘Alright. This is not a musical critique. This is someone’s pissed off and needing to get it out.’ So, you know, we don’t give a crap. We love what we do, and we’re doing it because we love doing it, and we’re making music we wanna hear. We’re artists, and it’s as simple as that. And you can judge it all you want, but we’re gonna do what we feel is right for us.”
On evolving:
“Well, I think we’re here to evolve, and we do—we do evolve. But I’ll tell you, I’m not one to judge anybody who’s an artist and doing what they want. If you make the same album over and over and over, that’s what you love doing, that’s your safety box, that’s awesome, and it’s reliable. So there’s always something good in whatever’s coming out. You know, we’re explorers, man—we love to try different stuff and stretch the limits.”
On owning their own label Blackened Records:
“Blackened Records is pretty major in my mind, it’s a major milestone for us, to own your own record company, actually have [it.] And my kids, they can’t fathom, like ‘what do you mean you own your own music’, why would you not? I try to explain to them that’s how things worked backed then and the fact that we have our own masters and our able to chart our own destiny with at least that, what cool packages can we put together? You know, we now own our own record press, for actual vinyl, which is super cool. So we’re very excited that’s another cool chapter for Metallica to get creative in.”
Metallica‘s new album, “Hardwired…To Self-Destruct“, will be released on November 18th. Their new visual history book of their “Master Of Puppets” era, ‘Metallica: Back To The Front‘, arrived earlier this week.
