Grade: B–
Chugga-chugga, grawch, chugga-chugga. Never mind 72 seasons, it’s actually been a little over 500 seasons since Metallica first started bestowing their peculiarly Los Angeles brand of heavy metal – shiny, taut and smooth – on a grateful audience of dispossessed lower-middle-class white incels. And nothing very much has changed. They have got better, if by better we mean that they are now astonishingly tight, anchored by the literal, almost militaristic drumming of Lars Ulrich. You would think that after 42 years they might have come up with a riff that really sticks in the mind, if only perhaps by accident, like that chimp at the typewriter. But nope. This album is a profusion of guitar riffs, each piled on top of the other, and none of them touches the sides, sadly.
We have the usual vainglorious or portentous titles – ‘Screaming Suicide’, ‘You Must Burn!’, ‘Shadows Follow’, ‘If Darkness Had a Son’.
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