Metal is magnetic

'Death Magnetic' is the ninth original studio album of Metallica's career — a career in which the band have sold over 100 million albums. Produced by Rick Rubin, 'Death Magnetic' is their first release since 2003's therapy session 'St. Anger' and also the first to feature bassist Robert Trujillo.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield, Metallica are one of the most successful and influential rock bands of all time, with their '80s albums 'Ride The Lightning' and 'Master Of Puppets' classics of the metal genre. Their 1991 album 'Metallica' — known to fans as The Black Album — pushed the group into the mainstream with singles like 'Enter Sandman', 'Sad But True', 'The Unforgiven' and 'Nothing Else Matters' pushing the album to sales of 15 million copies in the US alone.

Following a period in the creative wilderness — which saw the release of the disappointing 'Load' and 'Reload' albums, as well as personal turmoil that almost caused the group's collapse — Metallica are back with their strongest work in 17 years.

Now Hetfield, Ulrich, Trujillo and guitarist Kirk Hammett speak about the making of 'Death Magnetic', working with Rick Rubin, the "cathartic" experiences of 'St. Anger' and 'Some Kind Of Monster', and about their unique relationship with their fans.

Now that Death Magnetic is completed, how do you feel about the album?

Lars Ulrich: My head is still kind of spinning about the whole process, the last couple of years. But everybody who's heard the album says it sounds great, so I'll go along with that! It certainly has a lot of energy, it sounds very lively. One of the key things Rick Rubin wanted to do is to get Metallica to sound really live in the studio. Some of the previous records we made in the '90s, I think, got a little over-laboured, got a little too anal and detail-oriented. Rick wanted to preserve that wall of sound that happens when we play live, and I'm 100 percent sure that it's retained all that liveliness, that it's loud and in your face. My friends who've heard the album all like it, so I'll take that as a good thing!

James Hetfield: 'Death Magnetic' feels really good. It's old-school essence with new sonics. And it's the most band-like I can remember us being. We've gone through lots of growing up after 'St. Anger' — as much as we can say we're grown-up! I think the main part is realising friction is a part of it all. And we need each other more than we hate each other, simple as that!

Kirk Hammett: When we started writing songs for 'Death Magnetic' we were a band again because we'd gotten Rob. That was tremendous. We started playing like a band again, started sounding like a band, started creating like a band, and that was an obvious step up from our starting place last time with 'St. Anger'. I'm really proud of this album. It's too early to tell how it fits into the overall picture, but I really believe that this album is one of our finer moments.

Robert Trujillo: This being my first Metallica album, I feel like it's great. The creative environment can be a bit intimidating because it's so intense. With Lars and James, it's like going to the best school of songwriting. But they were really open to suggestion and they wanted to hear what I had to say.

Was it a conscious decision for Metallica to reconnect with their past on 'Death Magnetic'?

James: People have said it's 'Master Of Puppets II'. That turns me off… and scares me a little bit. 'Death Magnetic' is Rick Rubin and us trying to capture the essence, the hunger, the simplicity, the skeleton of Metallica. And that's what I think we captured. It really is very clear and obvious to me, and hopefully I can make this clear to the fans, that we write these songs for ourselves. You can't please everyone. There's always going to be someone who feels victimised by the way you've done something, and I totally get that. There are lots of bands I can't listen to after a certain album, and so be it. It's perfectly normal. But we are explorers, we have to move forward and keep going, we're artists, we're hungry for the best. The best has not been achieved yet, so on we go.

Kirk: One of the main concepts that Rick Rubin brought to the table when we were initially talking to him was that he knew, in his head, what the ultimate Metallica album should sound like. He said to us: 'Whatever you guys were doing, whatever you were thinking, what you were listening to, what you were eating, drinking… try to put your minds in that spot. Because whatever you guys were doing in the early '80s, mid '80s, you guys turned out some incredible music back then.' We listened to that and agreed. The attitude we had back then was a lot different to the attitude we have now. We were young, eager to prove ourselves — eager to prove that we were one of the heaviest bands around — and we wrote accordingly. So Rick said: 'Just put yourselves in that spot.' And it totally worked. It worked across the board: in the writing, the lyrics, the guitar solos, the attitude. I remember when it came time to put down guitar solos, I listened to all the stuff that I used to listen to as a teenager: a lot of UFO, Deep Purple and Rainbow, Van Halen's first album, Pat Travers. Initially I was shocked, because I found myself being re-inspired by all this stuff that influenced me back in the day, and it opened up my playing all over again. When I applied that attitude and brought that inspiration to the new songs I got some incredible results right off the bat. The self-referencing was working, and we weren't just copying ourselves. I really felt that we were going somewhere fresh and new.

Lars: Reconnecting with the past was something that definitely happened organically. Rick spends a lot of time just hanging out and talking about music, and during the first few months, he made us comfortable about revisiting and being inspired by some of the records that we put out in the '80s: 'Ride The Lightning', 'Master Of Puppets', '…And Justice For All'. When we finished 'Justice', we felt there was nothing more to do on that progressive, thrashy side of Metallica, so we spent the better part of the '90s running as far away from those records as we could. Rick made us feel okay about revisiting those records. We started the creative process for 'Death Magnetic' in the summer of 2006, which was when the 'Master Of Puppets' 20th anniversary was going down and we played that whole record live all over Europe and Asia. We got under the skin of 'Master Of Puppets' right as we started writing these new songs for 'Death Magnetic'. And that certainly made us feel comfortable about embracing some of the things that we had done in the '80s for the first time in 15 years. It’s been interesting. Rick would suggest: 'Listen to the same records that you listened to in the '80s, or try and write the same way.' It was never: 'Copy what you were doing musically.' It was: 'Put yourself in that headspace.' And it felt really good to do that, finally. We avoided going there for so long, but when we finally went back, it was like: 'Yeah, we can hang out here — we can be inspired by those records and feel good about it.'

Rob: It seems like the band, over the past ten or 15 years, has been trying to get away from the early years. And for me, coming into Metallica, I love everything that Metallica's done, but I really, really love the old-school stuff. And just the fact that the guys were open to that was a real positive thing. Rick was very clever, even in the tuning of the songs. 'Why does Metallica have everything tuned down a half step, or a whole step? Why doesn’t Metallica tune the way they did on 'Master Of Puppets'?' And so we ended up trying the songs in natural tune, and that's great — James can still sing his ass off, and there's a bit more angst to the vocal. I really like what James did. A lot of positive things came from Rick.

Was Death Magnetic an easy album to make, especially after the difficult birth of 'St. Anger'?

James: Making this record was certainly easier than 'St. Anger'. 'St. Anger' was a purging. It boiled to a point where one of the members couldn't hang anymore. And the three of us kinda joined together after that. When a fellow brother, soldier, whatever, leaves or falls, the others rally together. It was a great thing finding Rob. The dynamic of the band is quite different now. Lars and I fight over the steering wheel, and the other two guys are perfectly fine sitting in the back seat — and that is their pretty difficult contribution, at least in my mind. I could never sit back there and be okay with it. It works real good. So the making of this record was really so much more positive and productive, we were all really thinking the same way, we weren't stepping in each other’s way just for the sake of making it known that 'I'm here!' We were going for the same cause and mission.

Lars: We wrote for the better part of a year. The songs were all constant works in progress. Then we’d go on the road and get re-inspired by this and that… we ended up with 25 skeletons of songs and then started weeding them out and ended up with 14 that we recorded. We made a decision that we were gonna record and see 14 through. We did that, and it was pretty clear which songs ended up being 11, 12, 13, 14 on the list. And we remember the old days when you made records that were a whole instead of just individual songs. We wanted that sense of a complete record, so we picked the ones that did that the best. The only thing that Rick was really adamant about was that he did not want us to go into the studio until we could play these songs in our sleep, standing on our heads, backwards, upside-down, whatever. I know this sounds silly, but he didn't want the studio to be a place of creativity, he wanted the studio to be more a place of execution, where you just go in and you just f***ing bang this shit out. You do all the thinking and the tweaking in the pre-production.

Kirk: I think 'Death Magnetic' is a pretty logical step for us to take after 'St Anger'. We spent a lot of the time not really playing our instruments while we were making 'St. Anger', which was really strange, whereas on this album we actually played our instruments a lot while we were making it! We had a lot of material pre-written, and we just took it from there: we jammed on the music, started creating songs, and the album started taking shape. Then Rick Rubin came in and added his opinions and ideas on direction.

Rob: The making of 'Death Magnetic' was very organic. The songs started to blossom about five years ago, that’s when we started to develop ideas. After two years of touring, we had at least 60 hours of ideas. We had to read through that for a year. And the writing process was created through jamming. We built up about 25 songs, narrowed that down to 14, and then to 10 for the album. The pure fact that it was created through jamming was very organic. And Rick also wanted to capture a live feel from the band, so when we were actually recording the songs we were all standing up, like it was a performance. When I was tracking bass or re-tracking something, I would stand up and headbang or get on my knees or whatever, so there’s a lot of that feel.