Hardwired…to Self-Destruct is a Metallica album from 2016. It is their tenth studio album. At this point the band had existed for about 35 years; the first album was made in 1983, which means that they’ve done a new album on average every 3.3 years. Yet the last few albums have had at least five years between them. The album before this, Death Magnetic, was made 8 (!) years before. You could say that they slowed down their production speed quite a bit over the years. Yet, Metallica is undoubtedly the biggest metal band of all time.
Hardwired…to Self-Destruct starts off very nice! I hear something in the songs that I haven’t heard in a long time. There’s that extra crunch, that extra bit of energy, and, dare I say it, a touch of Thrash once again. Ok, I realize that I’m writing this in hindsight and that 2018 was a lot of years ago already, but I really thought that they were coming back to their roots and could make something really awesome again.
But, unfortunately, it doesn’t last. The first four songs or so are pretty damn good, but even among those, it’s a steady downward spiral in energy. I think maybe they should have made an epic EP instead; that would have been something masterful! Now, I must confess I get disappointed rather quickly. It’s still very good, but after a few songs it turns into something else. It’s nothing with edge anymore. There are “safe” songs with a lot of pentatonic blues solos in them.
I become bored even if it’s not bad by any means. But there’s also nothing to remember after those first four songs. Well, there are a couple of exceptions that lift it a bit; “ManUNkind” and “Murder One” are such songs. The latter is, of course, some kind of homage to the late Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead.
Is it worth 8 years of waiting? Maybe, but there are waaay too many fillers to become something really good and iconic like their early albums.
