HERALDSUN.COM.AU THURSDAY NOVEMBER 17 2016 HIT 33

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PEDAL TOTHE METAL

ADELE FINALLY COMING

Plenty of time to save up for those tickets ...

ARIAS LINE-UPFarnsey! Barnesy! Missy!

Could it be any more Aussie-tastic?

FANTASTIC BEASTS

Not perfect, but it’s kind of magic to be back in the Potter-verse again

AUSTRALIAN CRICKET TEAM

Own a bat? You might just get a gig

VALE LEONARD COHEN

Enough already, 2016!

BLOCK AUCTIONSFive fairly unlikeable

teams score hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why

can’t we stop watching?

HOTNOT

Thirty-five years and 110 million albums later and Metallica are still angry.

You can hear it coursing through the tracks on their new double album Hardwired … to Self Destruct — the sound is raw and heavy, full of unrelenting riffs yet balanced, with their signature sense of melody.

Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, now 53, says that no matter how comfortable you are — and with a $90 million fortune he’s pretty comfy — the anger that drives you remains.

“If you turn out to be an angry young kid, chances are you’ll grow up to be an angry young man and chances are you’ll remain an angry adult for the rest of your life — but the one choice you have is to process it in a healthy manner,” he says.

“All of us have this well of anger in us, it’s what attracted us to each other and we’ve learned to use it as a fountain for inspiration and creativity. The anger doesn’t go away.”

Channelling confusion andaggression into empowerment for generations of messed-up kids fuelled the band’s rise from pimply, long-haired Diamond Head acolytes into one of the biggest acts in the world. Their first four albums were stone cold classics — 1986’s Master Of Puppets recently became the first metal album added to the US Library of Congress — and their fifth, The Black Album (1991), remains America’s highest-selling record of the past 25 years.

Sure, they cut theirhair and lost their way in the ’90s — frontman James Hetfield

now dismisses it as “the U2 version of Metallica” — leading to career nadir St Anger in 2003 (it had no guitar solos, none!) but they got their mojo back thanks to group therapy, rehab and, of course, the guiding hand of producer Rick Rubin on 2008’s Death Magnetic.

Hardwired could go one better and fans seem genuinely excited about its classic, aggressive, riff-heavy sound. More surprisingly, alternative and mainstream rock radio in the US embraced the first thrashy single and title track (it went top 10 on both genres’ airplay charts) and even Triple J’s been spinning it here. Hammett can’t quite believe it.

“What’s incredible about that is that Hardwired is not your typical singalong,” he says.

“It sounds like (1983 debutsingle) Whiplash to me and its closest musical cousin is something off (debut LP) Kill ’Em All. People are playing this single everywhere and being really receptive to it, and it blows my mind because it doesn’t sound like anything that’s being played on the radio right now.”

So why’d it take eight years to

follow upDeath

Magnetic? The upshot of Hammett’s long answer is: they were busy. They toured for two years, started up and said goodbye to the Orion music festival (creatively adventurous but a financial disaster) and put out the well-reviewed, but ridiculously expensive $42 million concert/narrative film Through The Never, which had zero chance of making its money back. They also collaborated with Lou Reed on

the challenging, experimental 2011 side project Lulu. David Bowie loved it but fans reacted vehemently.

Work on Hardwired began in earnest in mid-2014 when

drummer Lars Ulrich sat down with an iPod towork his way through1500 Hetfield riffs —

every note the bandplays in rehearsalor concert is

recorded to mine

later for musical ideas. Founding member Ulrich became the musical gatekeeper, selecting which riff to put where on the album. “He’s into it and has the attention span,” Hammett explains.

This is the first album sinceHammett replaced Dave Mustaine (Megadeth) at the last minute on Kill ’Em All not to feature his name in the co-writing credits. It’s not because he’s run out of ideas — it’s because he lost them all.

“I had about 500 pieces of music on an iPhone and that iPhone I lost in Europe,” he says ruefully. “It’s one of the most regretful things that has happened to me in the past five years or so.”

His phone is now “double and triple backed up” and he’s been writing furiously since. “But the songs on this album were already written so I’ve put them in the deep freeze and hopefully we’ll break ’em out when it gets time to get songs together for the next album.”

But the experience has madehim question the whole notion of recording random riffs as part of the songwriting process. “If I have a tendency to forget

the riff or the feel then it couldn’t have been that

great to begin with,”he says, adding

that bands of the ’60s and ’70s had to remember their ideas.

“When it became possible for people to record every single little bit of music it kind of affected the quality of the music. It made it not so memorable as it used to be.”

Interesting point, considering how Hardwired was stitched together.

Hammett also went back tothe past to resurrect the way he used to attack solos. He’d realised that on recent albums he’s often overworked the solos, killing the feel in the process, and then being forced to return to his first take for inspiration. This time he just practised his chops relentlessly and went into the studio and winged it.

“They don’t sound like thestuff I did on previous albums. The last time I did anything remotely similar was Kill ’Em All. I barely knew the songs (then). It ended up sounding like Kill ’Em All, like not very controlled. Raw.”

Just then Hammett arrivesat that night’s venue. My final question’s the one every fan wants to know: how long can they keep doing this?

“I hope that we can go on for as long as The Rolling Stones, but our music is a lot more physically demanding than a lot of other bands.

“So it’s a question of how long our bodies will hold out.

I’m hoping there’sanother 10 years

at least.”

HEAR HARDWIRED ...

TO SELF DESTRUCT

(EMI) IS OUTTOMORROW

Anger management

“All of us have this well of anger in us, it’s what attracted us to each other”

K I R K H A M M E T T O NT H E I R I N S P I R A T I O N

Metallica’s Kirk Hammett is still angry but only in a healthy way nowadays, writes Andrew Fenton

Metallica (from left,

Robert Trujillo, James

Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and

Kirk Hammett).