METALLICA: Pro-Shot Video Of 'Moth Into Flame' Performance From Munich

Professionally filmed video footage of METALLICA performing the song "Moth Into Flame" on August 23 at Olympiastadion in Munich, Germany can be seen below.

"Moth Into Flame" is taken from METALLICA's latest studio album, "Hardwired...To Self-Destruct", which was released in November 2016 via Blackened Recordings.

METALLICA frontman James Hetfield spoke to Guitar World magazine about the lyrical inspiration for "Moth Into Flame", which describes a Britney Spears-like pop queen that crashes and burns. Asked if he had someone specifically in mind when he was writing the track, James said: "The 'pop queen' in the song is not really female or male. It's about how people think popularity or fame is going to solve their problems. Or whether fame should even be a goal for a musician. For us, fame has sometimes been a burden, like, how do we get rid of this thing? [Laughs] It's a Pandora's box that often makes you wonder, Okay, how do I become un-famous? Some people have felt that urge so strongly they've taken their own lives to escape it."

He continued: "The song was somewhat inspired by the Amy Winehouse documentary, 'Amy'. When I watched it, it really made me sad that a talented person like that fell for the fame part of it. But, to some degree, I see that mentality reflected in everyday life — people obsessively taking selfies and sending them to friends for validation."

Hetfield also talked about how "autobiographical" "Moth Into Flame" is, considering that the members of METALLICA were "pop queens" for a while during the "Black Album" period. "The 'Some Kind Of Monster' film is a prime example of believing that people need you in a certain way, and if you don't deliver, they'll hate you," he said. "I've experienced some aspect of that almost all my life. If you're not aware of it enough, the monster that is fame can swallow you up. During that period, we were being swallowed. We stopped caring about each other. We didn't care what METALLICA meant to us and other people. We could only see the ugly side and we wanted to get away from it. We couldn't see what was beautiful about our lives. Whatever you focus on, you start working toward, and at that point in our lives we were thinking, this is a hell for us. We lost perspective. Eventually we realized it wasn't about the fame and that we needed to care for the band and each other· That was a hard lesson to learn."

METALLICA will headline five major North American festivals next year, all of which are produced by Danny Wimmer Presents. The events are Epicenter, Welcome To Rockville, Sonic Temple Music + Arts, Louder Than Life and Aftershock. The band will play two separate headlining sets at each stop, with a unique setlist for each performance, resulting in 10 different shows.

These shows will be METALLICA's only U.S. festival appearances of 2020. The quartet will play on Friday night and Sunday night at each event.

To mark the 20th anniversary of METALLICA's first performance with the San Francisco Symphony, which resulted in the live "S&M" album and video, the band re-teamed with the symphony in early September for two shows for the grand opening of Chase Center, the new home of the Golden State Warriors.

A film of the concerts, called "S&M²", arrived in theaters worldwide in October.