New Metallica: Does Anyone Care?

Originally written on July 26th, 2016 for Tumblr

So Metallica finally has a new record coming out and the reception to this news has been… nonexistent. There’s the usual “they should apologize for St. Anger” crowd hating it already, and the die hards who are already planning to buy whatever bloated limited edition they are going to release, but besides the two extremes, there really hasn’t been any response to this album as of late.

Why is that exactly? I’m not 100% sure myself, but I think I have a small idea, in a post-Death Magnetic world, I think Metallica are going to slowly realize that they have competition. Most people will point out the fact that Metallica are just the worlds biggest sell outs and have chosen to ignore them, but I disagree. Oh they’re the biggest sellouts on the planet, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that Death Magnetic is a prime example that the band can still make music. They’re talented musicians, who for being total douche-bags, have earned the respect of many fans for simply willing to experiment and knowing when and how to return to the basics. Sure, we all wish that those experiments worked out (seriously though, we are all waiting for a St. Anger apology) but at least we have proof that they were just experimenting and not dying. No, what’s causing this has to be a bit more extreme, and I think it has something to do with the metal scene in the late 2000s. 

See, for those of you not into metal, there was a time when Metallica’s name meant that it would sell. In the 80s, they were the first metal band that wasn’t part of the pop-metal/glam scene that made some actual money, and that money just kept rolling in until “Metallica” aka the Black Album caused that rolling to change into snowballing. Paychecks turned into royalties and dump-trucks full of money and the sellout stigma began. But even as the 90s began and other bands started suffering once the music shift turned to alt rock and grunge, Metallica still made money. My theory on this is the same theory that keeps forcing Hollywood’s hand in making bad remakes and cash-grabs, Metallica had become the musical equivalent of McDonald’s, playing it safe and going along with the in-crowd in order to stay relevant. The quality of the music dropped, but to new fans, it sounded similar to the alt stuff they like, and to the older crowd, it was Metallica, so why not give it a chance. Remember, we don’t really have to worry about quality here, just success and money. That’s probably why Load and ReLoad still sold pretty well, cause Metallica had essentially cornered the market. The only thing it was missing was modern pop fans (which was always too large and out of their demographic to even bother), and hardcore grunge fans, who all pretty much died out after Cobain died and Alice In Chains broke up.

Another thing to keep in mind during this time period is that 90s thrash just wasn’t good. I’m quick to defend the 90s as a decade of bizarre experimentation in music, but unfortunately while experimentation is all well and good, it doesn’t help that the experimentation didn’t result in anything long lasting. 90s’ Thrash and to a lesser extent, the second wave of thrash metal in general, just didn’t cut it. I appreciate them, but can any of you name a song from Evil Dead, Toxik, or Razor?  All we really got was groove metal, a genre that only overlaps and dilutes itself as every single band besides Overkill tries to sound like Phil Anselmo and Pantera for some ungodly reason. Yeah there was crossover, but it didn’t really go anywhere because punks and metalheads still didn’t get along… for some reason. There was sludge metal, which who really likes Crowbar anyways, and there was whatever was going on with Tool, who didn’t really nail their own style until Lateralus. Shut up, Ænima is overrated. 

So the short version is, even when Metallica kind of sucked, they still were popular, and even with St. Anger still being an ever-so-present stain on their record, Death Magnetic seemed like a stain eraser, or at least a Tide stick. What I mean is that Metallica figured their shit out in the late 2000s, but at the same time, so did everyone else.  

See the thing about the early 2000s is, they were pretty much the 90s but wearing a different skin, a different skin that happened to include more experimental music and styles that gave us alt metal bands like Disturbed and 5FDP and the emo craze and alike. But we were also getting farther and farther away from good thrash and good metal bands in general. It wasn’t until the generation or two after Metallica’s time, people born in the 90s but grew up listening to their parents’ records, and using the power of the baby internet to discover more of it, drew a deep love and devotion for classic albums, and put that love to use in the form of their own bands. This led to modern thrash, something that is no longer just an idea but a defined genre with it’s own bands, and sound. Something heavily inspired by the godfathers of heavy metal, and the modern experimental stuff that happened to stick around, all with the power of modern technology and recording equipment to make even the most broke person on Earth capable of recording a song. 

2008 was a pretty important year for music. Not only did Metallica and AC/DC make pretty strong returns, but the modern thrash era was just beginning with bands releasing their best albums to date, or at least the ones that made them the most famous and proved that modern thrash was one big joke. It’s here that our shift takes place as suddenly dozens of modern classic albums are released and modern thrash, hell, modern metal in general is solidified.

Just to remind you, Warbringer’s “War Without End”, Toxic Holocaust’s “An Overdose of Death…”, and Gama Bomb’s “Citizen Brain” were released in 2008, Skeletonwitch’s “Beyond the Permafost”  and Evile’s “Enter the Grave” were released in 2007, and Havok’s “Burn”,  Vektor’s “Black Future”, and Aggression’s “Moshpirit” would release in 2009. These are the albums that finally said, “we can make thrash work. And not just work, but make it something that doesn’t just carry on the legacy of old heroes, but create entirely new ones.”

And that’s why Metallica is out of luck or at least, out of hype this time around. Not only is their fan-base too old to really listen to their style of music anymore, but a whole new generation is no longer, for lack of a better word, settling for them. Metallica for the first time in a long time is facing a world that has moved on from them, and I for one am interested to see how all this plays out.

Hell, maybe they’ll just blame piracy again. Go on Lars, attack YouTube. Or be a huge idiot and attack Napster again.