Rating: 10 / 10 Stars
METALLICA is: James Hetfield (Lead Vocals and Rhythm Guitar), Kirk Hammett (Lead Guitar), Robert Trujillo (Bass and Backing Vocals), and Lars Ulrich (Drums)
REVIEW – There are bands that release albums, and then there is Metallica, a band whose every studio return feels less like a product cycle and more like a geological event. By the time 72 Seasons arrived on April 14, 2023, through Blackened Recordings, the conversation around Metallica had already become bigger than the music itself: legacy, endurance, reinvention, nostalgia, trauma, aging, and the impossible expectation of being measured against your own monuments. The band’s official discography lists 72 Seasons as a 12-track album recorded and mixed at HQ in San Rafael, California, produced by Greg Fidelman with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. Metallica also described the album as totaling more than 77 minutes, an enormous runtime that immediately signals the band’s refusal to shrink itself for the streaming era.
The title itself gives the record its emotional skeleton. Seventy-two seasons equals the first eighteen years of life, the formative span in which identity is shaped, distorted, inherited, wounded, and defended. Hetfield’s explanation of the concept, included on Metallica’s official album page, frames the record around the “true or false selves” that emerge from childhood conditioning and the way adult life becomes either a reenactment of those early experiences or a reaction against them. That idea matters because 72 Seasons is not simply another late-career thrash record. It is Metallica staring backward without surrendering to the past, trying to understand why the same ghosts keep walking into the room wearing different faces.
The opening title track is a statement of intent in every possible sense. At nearly eight minutes, “72 Seasons” does not ease the listener into the album. It throws the gates open. The track begins with a hard-charging, Motörhead-like momentum before accelerating into the kind of locomotive thrash that Metallica made immortal in the 1980s. But the difference now is emotional density. This is not young fury looking for an enemy in the outside world. This is older fury, heavier fury, the kind that has learned the enemy may have been living inside the house all along. Hetfield sounds less interested in performance than excavation, digging through memory, formation, and the psychological residue of becoming.
“Shadows Follow” keeps the pressure high, operating in that classic Metallica zone where riffs feel less written than forged. The song’s strength is in its blunt persistence. It does not need to reinvent Metallica’s vocabulary because it understands the violent efficiency of that vocabulary when deployed with conviction. The shadows of the title are not abstract. Across this album, darkness behaves like inheritance. It follows because it was built into the body early, because identity is not something we simply choose one day but something we spend a lifetime either obeying or resisting.
With “Screaming Suicide,” Metallica take one of the album’s most dangerous lyrical risks. The track approaches suicide not from a distance, but as a voice, a presence, a manipulative internal force. It is direct, uncomfortable, and necessary. Hetfield has long been at his most powerful when writing about captivity: addiction, rage, shame, fear, cycles of damage. Here, the captivity is psychological, and the song’s driving structure makes the subject feel less like confession and more like combat. It is not delicate, but Metallica rarely are. Their gift has always been turning private collapse into something communal, something screamed back at the void.
“Sleepwalk My Life Away” moves with a heavy-lidded groove, its title capturing the album’s fixation on unconscious living. There is a difference between being alive and being awake, and 72 Seasons repeatedly returns to that distinction. The track feels like a mid-tempo cousin to the band’s Black Album era instincts, but filtered through the thicker production and bruised introspection of modern Metallica. Robert Trujillo’s bass presence gives the song a low, muscular gravity, while the band allows the groove to breathe without losing menace.
“You Must Burn!” is one of the album’s most imposing pieces, carrying the weight and dark swing of early-’90s Metallica while leaning into something almost ritualistic. The song feels like judgment, but not clean judgment. The title could be accusation, command, or prophecy. That ambiguity gives it force. Hetfield’s voice, weathered but still unmistakably commanding, brings a preacher-at-the-edge-of-the-fire quality to the track. The band has always understood that metal is not merely about aggression. It is about atmosphere, threat, and the almost theatrical power of inevitability.
Then comes “Lux Æterna,” the album’s most immediate blast of adrenaline. As the first single, it was the right calling card: short, fast, bright, and openly rooted in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal energy that helped form Metallica in the first place. The Diamond Head spirit is unmistakable, but the song does not feel like cosplay. It feels like four veterans reconnecting with the spark that made them want to play loud in the first place. In an album filled with self-analysis and emotional weight, “Lux Æterna” is the flash of pure ignition.
“Crown of Barbed Wire” drags the listener back into heavier psychological territory. The image itself is perfect for late-period Metallica: authority and suffering twisted together, kingship as punishment, identity as a throne you bleed to sit upon. Musically, the track has a grinding patience, less interested in sprinting than in tightening the walls. It is one of the album’s more brooding moments, and while it may not strike with the instant force of the singles, it deepens the record’s central theme of inherited pain and self-made prisons.
“Chasing Light” offers one of the more hopeful titles on the album, though Metallica’s version of hope is rarely clean or easy. The song suggests movement, pursuit, and resistance against internal darkening. What makes 72 Seasons compelling is that it does not pretend awareness solves everything. Knowing the shape of your damage does not automatically free you from it. “Chasing Light” understands that hope is active. It is not something that arrives. It is something you hunt.
“If Darkness Had a Son” is among the album’s most memorable conceptual turns. The phrase alone feels carved from Metallica’s mythology, joining the band’s long history of songs that personify inner destruction. It is also one of the record’s clearest examples of Hetfield wrestling with lineage: what darkness gives birth to, what pain reproduces, what gets passed down when nobody breaks the chain. The track’s stomp and repetition create a sense of ritual, as if the band is circling a truth too large to strike directly.
“Too Far Gone?” injects urgency back into the album with one of its most infectious arrangements. The question mark is everything. Metallica are not declaring damnation; they are asking whether return is still possible. That uncertainty gives the song its emotional lift. The guitar harmonies bring a Thin Lizzy-like melodic charge, and the track’s compactness works in its favor. After so many long, weight-bearing songs, “Too Far Gone?” lands like a sharpened blade.
“Room of Mirrors” is one of the record’s strongest late-album statements because it turns reflection into confrontation. Mirrors can reveal, but they can also multiply distortion. On an album about formative identity, the image of a room full of reflections feels almost inevitable. Which version of the self is real? Which was inherited? Which was built for survival? Which has become a cage? The song captures the exhaustion of self-examination while still moving with classic Metallica momentum, proving that introspection does not have to soften the blow.
And then there is “Inamorata,” the 11-minute closer and, as Metallica’s official album page confirms, the final track in the album’s 12-song sequence. It is also the song that most fully justifies the record’s sprawl. “Inamorata” is not long simply because Metallica can write long songs. It feels long because misery, attachment, and self-destruction are long. They linger. They repeat. They seduce. The line “Misery, she loves me, but I love her more” feels like a thesis statement for the entire album, whether or not one hears an echo of “My Friend of Misery.” This is Metallica treating pain not only as an enemy, but as an intimate companion, something hated and needed, rejected and protected. The song stretches because the emotional pattern stretches. That is its point.
The fascinating tension of 72 Seasons is that it is both familiar and unusually revealing. The riffs often look backward. The structures are massive. The production is modern but not radically transformed. The album is unmistakably Metallica in almost every recognizable way. Yet beneath that recognizable armor is a record deeply concerned with origin wounds, cycles, childhood programming, emotional inheritance, and the strange burden of surviving long enough to understand yourself.
At 77 minutes, 72 Seasons is undeniably a lot of Metallica. Some listeners will find it too long, too determined to occupy every inch of space available. But excess has always been part of Metallica’s language. They do not whisper their way through existential inquiry. They build machines around it. They hammer it into riffs, drag it through repetition, and let Hetfield bark it into being like a man trying to command his own ghosts into submission.
What separates this album from simple late-career nostalgia is its emotional premise. Metallica are not merely asking, “Do we still sound like Metallica?” They are asking something heavier: “Why are we still fighting the same battles?” That question gives 72 Seasons its real gravity. The band may revisit thrash, NWOBHM, Black Album heft, Load-era sprawl, and modern hard-rock muscle, but the album’s true subject is the self as a battlefield built before adulthood even began.
With 72 Seasons, Metallica deliver a record that is bruised, massive, self-reflective, and defiant. It does not always edit itself, but it rarely feels careless. It is the sound of a band still wrestling with the machinery of identity after more than four decades of volume, rupture, triumph, and survival. If the first 72 seasons make us who we are, Metallica seem determined to spend the remaining seasons finding out whether that sentence can be challenged, rewritten, or burned down completely.
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