METALLICA's LARS ULRICH: 'We Realized That We Really Need Each Other'

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich was interviewed on a recent episode of the Norwegian-Swedish television talk show "Skavlan". You can now watch video footage of his appearance below.

Asked how he can still stand his bandmates after being in METALLICA for 35 years, Ulrich said: "The worst part, actually, was, I guess, around fifteen years ago in that movie ['Some Kind Of Monster'], the stuff that was documented. After the first twenty years, there were a few bumps in the road, and we realized that we'd actually never really talked to each other; we'd never really, sort of, spoken about how we were feeling about what was going on. We had been so busy and things had been moving so fast that we never slowed down long enough to take a temperature check of how everybody was doing."

He continued: "So our bass player, Jason [Newsted], left, and that was the first domino in a lot of strange stuff that happened. And for about two years, it was kind of shaky and we were going through some issues. But on the other side of that, [since] 2003, it's been fine. We got some help. There was a gentleman named Phil that came in, I guess you'd call him a psychiatrist or a team mobilizer, whatever. He came in and we talked to each other and him for about two years, while we were still working and making progress. And that helped us a lot. And since, it's been ten, twelve years now, we're all fine. We talk to each other, we're civil, we understand each other's breaking points. And we have learned… It only took twenty, thirty years, but we've learned to listen to each other. The word 'empathy' was not in the vocabulary for the first couple of decades, but it's a big part of what we deal with now, and just hearing each other out and trying to understand somebody else's point of view. And I also think there's a lot more trust now in each other. We realized that we really need each other. METALLICA is better as a collective than it is if it's just a bunch of autonomous, single-minded guys going at it."

METALLICA's tenth studio album, "Hardwired...To Self-Destruct", is scheduled for a November 18 release 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.

"Hardwired...To Self-Destruct" was produced by Greg Fidelman with frontman James Hetfield and Ulrich. The band recorded the disc at its own studio.

Instead of a previously announced bonus disc of demos, the deluxe edition of the album will now feature a number of cover songs that the band has recorded over the past few years, including a medley of Ronnie James Dio songs, IRON MAIDEN's "Remember Tomorrow" and DEEP PURPLE's "When A Blind Man Cries".

The deluxe version will also feature a live set recorded at Rasputin's in Berkeley, California on Record Store Day 2016 and a live version of the new song "Hardwired" recorded last month at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.