Metallica will release their first new album in seven years 72 Seasons on April 14 and drummer Lars Ulrich can't help but read what people are saying.
In an interview with Metal Hammer, Ulrich said he originally broke the golden rule of "don't read the comments" when Metallica surprise released their new single "Lux Æterna" because of course he had to know what people thought. He also touches on not taking comments personally, which has to be hard for a dude like Ulrich considering how unkind the Internet can be about him.
"If you decide to go down into the comment sections, at least for me, you have to prepare yourself for not taking any of it overly personally. You have to kind of remove yourself from it. But I'd like to challenge anybody in a band to say they don't look at comments.”
"I mean, I'm not sitting up until four o'clock in the morning scrolling through every one. But when you haven't put any music out in five or six years and you dump something like 'Lux Æterna' on an unsuspecting world, you're going to want to see what the feedback is."
A quick glance at the top YouTube comments on "Lux Æterna" all seem pretty positive, so at least Lars had a good time with those. Other social media is a little harder to gauge, but it's pretty easy to assume what camps Metallica fans fall into these days – there's the "not the first four albums" crowd, the accusatory "sellout" crowd, the nitpickers, and varying degrees of people who either love the band or are just grateful they're getting new music.
On the topic of artists not reading comments, does anyone really believe that? Obviously someone like Lars Ulrich is a busy dude, but releasing a single that literally the entire world is talking about and not being curious about the tone of the conversation ain't happening.
In a previous interview with The Howard Stern Show, Ulrich said he was mostly just glad that news of 72 Seasons didn't leak before its announcement.
"We thought for sure this thing would leak. It hasn't fucking leaked." Which actually is pretty nuts when you think about it – no photos surfaced, no information managed to leak online, nobody slipped up and mentioned something they shouldn't have, nothing. Just all of a sudden 72 Seasons was part of our lives one day.
"We've been working on a new album for the last year, year and a half — our COVID lockdown record. And the one thing that we've done all through that is for the first time in our career, we never really talked about it. So, rather than, 'Hey, there's a new record' and countdowns, and, 'Guess what's coming your way,' and all that kind of shit, we've been tight-fucking-lipped about it. And this morning I wanna share a new song with the world and I wanna tell everybody about the new Metallica album. And we have a new tour, we have a song, we have a video — all the bells and whistles."
