METALLICA: Making Of 'Hardwired' (Video)

A nine-minute video clip featuring behind-the-scenes footage from the writing and recording sessions for “Hardwired”, the opening song from brand new METALLICA album, “Hardwired…To Self-Destruct”, can be seen below.

METALLICA performed “Hardwired” live for the first time Saturday night (August 20) during the band’s headlining concert at the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“Hardwired…To Self-Destruct” will be released on November 18 via Blackened Recordings. The long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s “Death Magnetic” consists of two discs, containing a dozen songs and nearly 80 minutes of music.

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich told Fox 9 that the band played “Hardwired” “all in the same room” for the first time ON Monday, August 15 in preparation for the Minneapolis concert. He said: “This is as fresh off the assembly line as rock and roll gets.”

The drummer talked to Rolling Stone about the creation of “Hardwired”. He said: “That’s actually the last song we wrote for the record. We started this album by throwing different ideas around. The shape of it, as a collection of songs, didn’t come into focus until we were deep into it. At that point, the songs were getting tighter, shorter and leaner.”

He continued: “A couple of months ago, we were sitting there taking stock of the record and thought maybe we should write one more fast, little crazy song, and that became ‘Hardwired’. It just kind of happened. I think James [Hetfield, METALLICA frontman] and I wrote and recorded it in less than a week, which, for us, is basically a nanosecond.”

“Hardwired…To Self-Destruct” was produced by Greg Fidelman with Hetfield and Ulrich. The band recorded the disc at its own studio and is still putting the finishing touches on the LP.

According to Ulrich, METALLICA wrote most of the songs for “Hardwired…To Self-Destruct” in the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015. The band’s initial goal with the new record was “to continue where we left off,” the drummer said. “Since ‘Death Magnetic’, we’ve been on a roll: We did the Lou Reed stuff, a Ronnie Dio–RAINBOW medley, a DEEP PURPLE cover and obviously the [‘Through The Never’] movie took two years. Greg Fidelman has been working with us full time since then. We haven’t had time to sit down and asses what we’re doing. So it wasn’t until farther into the process that we took stock of what we were doing and asked what we were trying to say with the album. That’s when things came more into shape and became more coherent. But we didn’t work with a mission statement.”

Asked about his previous comment that the songs on “Hardwired” would sound “less frenetic” than those on “Death Magnetic”, Ulrich explained: “Most of the songs are simpler. We introduce a mood and we stick to it, rather than songs we’ve done where one riff happens and we go over here and then over there and becomes a journey through all these different soundscapes. The songs are more linear. And by ‘less frenetic,’ I mean there are certainly less starts and stops in the songs. It cruises along a little bit more than the last record.”

“Hardwired…To Self-Destruct” will be issued on double CD, vinyl and digital download. A deluxe version will feature a bonus disc containing the riffs that formed the origins of the album along with “The Lords Of Summer”, which the band debuted on tour a couple of years ago.