St.Anger

It has been a very interesting three years", Lars Ulrich begins with atypical understatment. "A very different three years for us. Difficult. Awkward. It's been a ride that's taken us to places inside ourselves, inside the band, inside the potential of human beings and the music and everything else we could not imagine existed. But if you asked me then, I would say for the first time in my life with Metallica, I was starting to prepare myself that maybe the ride was over".

If it sounds like the tenets of a Herculean struggle, who else but Metallica to apply for the job. The result of the 'ride' Lars refers to can indeed be found in the blood, sweat and blood and grooves of 'St. Anger'. From the album's crushing title songs and its burnished heaps of magnified guitar and drums, to the colossal time and tempo changes of 'Frantic', to the chugging slabs and staccato exchanges of the exalting confessional 'My World', Metallica has once again, in the boldest strokes imaginable, made music its most viable currency.

"I think the great thing about Metallica is that we can we can pretty much chart where we want to chart. Playing other people's material (like on
'Garage Inc') was something we talked about for years. It was the music the band was basically founded on. With the Symphony stuff we got a call from Michael Kamen who wanted to do it and the band was excited by the challenge - something that Metallica has always embraced. But now that we are back to playing the stuff that people think is the purest, it is the most natural, it is the most effortless. The other thing I think we're challenging here is that most people have the perception that in order for things to be really, really energetic that they can only come from negative energy. Metallica was fueled by negative energy for twenty years. Now we've spent a lot of time working on ourselves and on our relationships and we've turned that around. Metallica is fueled bypositive energy that has manifested itself so it sounds like the album we've made"