Metallica – 72 Seasons – Double Vinyl Records

Description

Metallica – 72 Seasons – Double Vinyl Records

Metallica make the scale of 72 Seasons clear from the opening title track: a long, driving piece that gives the guitars and rhythm section time to gather force before the vocal arrives. Released in April 2023, the album contains twelve songs and was produced by Greg Fidelman with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. It is the band’s first studio album since Hardwired… to Self-Destruct in 2016. Hetfield, Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo return to a broad, riff-centered approach, allowing shorter bursts of speed and heavier extended songs to occupy the same record.

The title refers to the first eighteen years of a person’s life, understood as seventy-two seasons that shape later habits and beliefs. Hetfield uses that idea to frame questions about how childhood continues to affect adult experience. It gives the album’s interest in darkness, struggle and persistence a human point of reference. The music still has the power and precision expected of Metallica, but the underlying concerns are close to home: what a person carries forward, how those patterns repeat and where there might be room to change them.

‘Lux Æterna’ supplies one of the album’s most immediate passages, moving quickly and keeping its arrangement compact. ‘Too Far Gone?’ provides another relatively concise burst, while ‘Shadows Follow’ and ‘Chasing Light’ keep the guitars moving through firm, insistent patterns. Elsewhere, ‘You Must Burn!’ and ‘If Darkness Had a Son’ give heavier figures more time to work. That variation in length and weight is important to the record’s flow. Its songs share a muscular sound without all arriving at their destination by the same route.

The closing ‘Inamorata’ takes the opposite approach to the shortest tracks, stretching beyond eleven minutes and allowing its central ideas to unfold across several changes of mood and intensity. It makes a fitting endpoint for an album that is willing to stay inside a riff and examine what happens around it. Before that finale, ‘Room of Mirrors’ adds another substantial piece to the program. The sequence gives the full band plenty of space, from Hetfield’s rhythm work and vocal attack to Hammett’s leads, Trujillo’s bass and Ulrich’s driving drums.

Recorded and mixed at Metallica’s headquarters in San Rafael, California, between March 2021 and November 2022, 72 Seasons presents a concentrated statement from the four musicians. Greg Fidelman also mixed the album, with mastering by Bob Ludwig and vinyl lacquers cut by Chris Bellman. This double-LP release contains the complete twelve-track studio album on Blackened Recordings. The yellow cover is instantly recognizable, but the record’s character comes from the weight of its guitars, the varied scale of its songs and the personal questions running through the music.

Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic

Release Details

Artist

Metallica

Album

72 Seasons

Format

Double Vinyl Records

Media configuration

2 LPs

Original album release

2023

Label

Blackened Recordings

Track Listing

72 Seasons

Shadows Follow

Screaming Suicide

Sleepwalk My Life Away

You Must Burn!

Lux Æterna

Crown of Barbed Wire

Chasing Light

If Darkness Had a Son

Too Far Gone?

Room of Mirrors

Inamorata