Given that the quartet have already released deluxe reissues of Kill Em All, Ride The Lightning, Master Of Puppets, and …And Justice For All in recent years, an expanded reissue of Metallica, which will celebrate its 30th birthday on August 12, 2021, would make perfect sense.
Know the world over as the ‘Black Album’, Metallica has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spent a remarkable 580 (non-consecutive) weeks on the Billboard 200 chart in America, an achievement bettered only by one other studio album in history, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon.
Someone on the Metallica Reddit actually posted a screenshot of the Instagram video, which also had the hashtag, “coming this fall” at the very bottom. The band apparently removed that hashtag from the caption, because people in the comments also wrote: “coming this fall.”
This year marks the 30th anniversary of The Black Album, which was initially released on Aug. 12, 1991. Some of Metallica’s Instagram followers have speculated that the “fall” hashtag was alluding to some sort of box set to commemorate the anniversary of the album, while others are curious whether it means they are releasing a whole new album in general.
A new Metallica record would be their first release since 2016’s Hardwired… to Self-Destruct. We do know that the band wrote 10 songs during the COVID-19 lockdown, however, Lars Ulrich admitted earlier this year that their progress on the new album has been very slow — “glacial” is the exact term he used.
Oran O’Beirne
www.overdrive.ie 2021
