A review of the newest Metallica Album

Metallica: 72 Seasons Album Cover

Legendary thrash metal band Metallica has recently released a new full length album: 72 seasons. After almost 6 years of absence since their previous album “Hardwired to Self Destruct” which was released to mixed reviews, Metallica has released a new LP on the 14th of April. They  released various singles to promote the album all throughout late 2022 and early 2023 such as Lux Aeterna, Screaming Suicide, and if Darkness Had a Son. So, I will be listening and reviewing it for the reader’s enjoyment today.

The album starts off with a very loud, very fast paced title track to really get the blood pumping for this album. James Hetfield’s vocals are great and even for a 7 minute opener it doesn’t stagnate. 

After that comes Shadows Follows which keeps up with the speed of the previous track, and is overall pretty unnoteworthy follow up. 

Then there’s the single Screaming Suicide which has a more more “upbeat“ and has a great riff to go with it wich is a nice change of pace from the samey-ness of the last two tracks.

Sleepwalk My Life has a very typical black album-esqe Metallica sound to it. It’s also a bit slower in speed and more methodical than the previous tracks. The second half of the song did drag a bit with its almost 7 minute track time. 

Hetfield’s vocals in You Must Burn are really the highlight of this track, it is almost beautiful in a way and sadly the instrumentals are unable to do justice while James is painting this horrific imagery of inquisitions and the burning of falsely accused heretics. 

Then there’s Lux Aeterna, the first single released for this Album almost 6 months ago. Bringing up the speed again this track acts as a great midpoint for the album, with some great solos this track is far “simpler” which some may not like due to its overly fast pace and short 3 minute run time. 

Crown of Barbed Wire is ok. Though it feels as though the instruments don’t compliment the vocals well enough. It seems as though they are both from completely different songs put together. 

Once again in the next track Chasing Light the vocals seem to be for a song that is longer and more ballad-like, not these more fast based “typical Metallica” instrumentals.

I feel as though a lot of these songs would be better off being turned into more slower power ballads (they certainly have the runtime of one) like the kind from Justice For All. The instrumentals are great, the vocals are great, but there is a dissonance almost as though they would be better off with the vocals needing more experimental instrumentation and the instrumentals needing something simpler, more catchy, more mainstream metal sound. 

If Darkness Had A Son starts off with this marching band-like rhythm that reminds me of other Metallica songs like Metal Militia from Kill Em All. Other than that the riffs and everything else is very simple, too simple even. There is a lack of experimentation which I feel like at this point Metallica would really benefit from. 

In the next track Too Far Gone Again, Metallica is playing it safe even though there is so much potential for experimentation. It’s not like it would be financially unwise to do so because all of the band members are multi millionaires and even if they dropped another stinker like Saint Anger it would at least be commendable instead of releasing these same inoffensive albums every six years. Because at this point in their career if anyone wants to hear what they hear in this album but better they would listen to like, the Black Album or Load or Reload or really anything else because there really isn’t anything new to offer here even though there are inklings of potential here and there.

The vocals are great on this one but once again instead of taking it slow and giving us something more melodic and ballad-esqe we just get more boring anodyne playing it safe music. However there are parts of this song that I do like, however I wish I could dissect those parts and isolate them because the rest of the song is just, underwhelming. 

The final track Inamorata is an 11 minute power ballad that allows Hetfield to really flex his vocal talents. Inamorata really shows us what 72 Seasons could have been and how much potential it had if Metallica had just decided to take risks and experiment. At around the midway point of the track it strips back to this beautiful acoustic sound with some of the best vocals on the album, if there was more of this the album would be so much better but instead we just have the same anodyne Metallica songs that have plagued their career since they switched to a more mainstream metal in Black Album. 

72 Seasons can be defined with one word: Potential. There is so much that could have been done to make this album way better than it is! Hetfield’s vocals are the best they have been for a long time, the instrumentals and production are amazing (Especially the bass, Trujillo sounds amazing on this album) and overall this album was mixed incredibly well. However, at a run time of an hour and seventeen minutes you would expect Metallica to maybe slow it down, and experiment and play with new ideas instead of making songs that to any lesser Metal band would be the peak of their career. 

I hope that in their next album, Metallica will try to take some more risks sonically and try to experiment and try out some new things, because if we get more of this then the future of Metallica albums is pretty freaking boring.