Album review: Hardwired... To Self-Destruct marks more of the same from Metallica

Too many tracks simply chug along in routine riff-grinding mode, but, that said, there is still plenty to enjoy here.

Album cover of Hardwired… To Self-Destruct by Metallica. Courtesy Blackened Recordings

Hardwired... To Self-Destruct

Metallica

(Blackened)

Three stars

At a crucial point in their careers, all game-changing musical pioneers face a tough dilemma: continue to explore and experiment, which risks alienating your audience, or endlessly rehash an established formula in a bid to stay commercially popular.

As their final albums demonstrated, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie were very much in the former category. The Rolling Stones have long remained in the latter.

Frustratingly, thrash-metal heavyweights Metallica have wavered between these two poles for decades, sometimes challenging themselves and their fans, before falling back into a more conservative, crowd-pleasing musical mode.

An 88-minute double-disc monster, Hardwired... To Self-Destruct is Metallica's first studio album since Death Magnetic in 2008 – and it is a fairly straight affair. It is also their first release in 25 years not to feature a big-name producer at the helm, and the first in decades to feature no songwriting input from lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who mislaid an iPhone containing his musical sketches while touring Europe.

These might all be factors to blame for the album’s slightly uninspired, unfocused feel.

That said, there is still plenty to enjoy here, including the two pleasingly punchy pre-­release singles.

The title track is an exhilarating three-minute temper tantrum of machine-gun punk-metal, while Moth into Flame is another uncharacteristically concise belch of skull-pounding, ear-bursting aggression.

The brooding power ballad Halo On Fire builds to a molten frenzy of volcanic tumult, while Now That We're Dead is a growling gothic love song in which James Hetfield serenades his corpse bride with appealingly dark humour: "Now that were dead, my dear, we can be together..."

Sadly, too many tracks on Hardwired... simply chug along in routine riff-grinding mode. Functional but unremarkable numbers include Dream No More, a paean to cult horror author H P Lovecraft's ancient mythical beast Cthulhu, a recurring motif in previous Metallica songs. Or Murder One, a churning, sludge-metal tribute to the band's late friend Lemmy, who died in December last year, which is full of lyrical homages to Motörhead, but ultimately lacks the grizzled charisma and subversive mischief of the man himself.

Hardwired... finishes on a high, though, with Spit Out Bone, an operatically huge uber-thrash epic with lyrics that look forward to mankind's extinction at the hands of genocidal machines. Gloriously loud and ugly, this is a welcome reminder of Hetfield and Lars Ulrich at their uncompromising, senses-­clobbering best.

A handful more of these gnarly, crackly, none-more-black anthems would have helped make this a great album, instead of just a sporadically diverting trudge through Metallica’s well-trodden discomfort zone.