METALLICA's ULRICH On 'Death Magnetic': 'Everybody Who's Heard The Album Says It Sounds Great'

iafrica.com has posted a lengthy interview with the four members of METALLICA about the group's new album, "Death Magnetic". An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Q: Now that "Death Magnetic" is completed, how do you feel about the album?

Lars Ulrich: "My head is still kind of spinning about the whole process, the last couple of years. But everybody who's heard the album says it sounds great, so I'll go along with that! It certainly has a lot of energy, it sounds very lively. One of the key things [producer] Rick Rubin wanted to do is to get METALLICA to sound really live in the studio. Some of the previous records we made in the '90s, I think, got a little over-laboured, got a little too anal and detail-oriented. Rick wanted to preserve that wall of sound that happens when we play live, and I'm 100 percent sure that it's retained all that liveliness, that it's loud and in your face. My friends who've heard the album all like it, so I'll take that as a good thing!"

James Hetfield: "'Death Magnetic' feels really good. It's old-school essence with new sonics. And it's the most band-like I can remember us being. We've gone through lots of growing up after 'St. Anger' — as much as we can say we're grown-up! I think the main part is realizing friction is a part of it all. And we need each other more than we hate each other, simple as that!"

Kirk Hammett: "When we started writing songs for 'Death Magnetic' we were a band again because we'd gotten Rob. That was tremendous. We started playing like a band again, started sounding like a band, started creating like a band, and that was an obvious step up from our starting place last time with 'St. Anger'. I'm really proud of this album. It's too early to tell how it fits into the overall picture, but I really believe that this album is one of our finer moments."

Robert Trujillo: "This being my first METALLICA album, I feel like it's great. The creative environment can be a bit intimidating because it's so intense. With Lars and James, it's like going to the best school of songwriting. But they were really open to suggestion and they wanted to hear what I had to say."

Q: Was it a conscious decision for METALLICA to reconnect with their past on "Death Magnetic"?

James: "People have said it's 'Master Of Puppets II'. That turns me off… and scares me a little bit. 'Death Magnetic' is Rick Rubin and us trying to capture the essence, the hunger, the simplicity, the skeleton of METALLICA. And that's what I think we captured. It really is very clear and obvious to me, and hopefully I can make this clear to the fans, that we write these songs for ourselves. You can't please everyone. There's always going to be someone who feels victimized by the way you've done something, and I totally get that. There are lots of bands I can't listen to after a certain album, and so be it. It's perfectly normal. But we are explorers, we have to move forward and keep going, we're artists, we're hungry for the best. The best has not been achieved yet, so on we go."

Kirk: "One of the main concepts that Rick Rubin brought to the table when we were initially talking to him was that he knew, in his head, what the ultimate METALLICA album should sound like. He said to us: 'Whatever you guys were doing, whatever you were thinking, what you were listening to, what you were eating, drinking… try to put your minds in that spot. Because whatever you guys were doing in the early '80s, mid-'80s, you guys turned out some incredible music back then.' We listened to that and agreed. The attitude we had back then was a lot different to the attitude we have now. We were young, eager to prove ourselves — eager to prove that we were one of the heaviest bands around — and we wrote accordingly. So Rick said: 'Just put yourselves in that spot.' And it totally worked. It worked across the board: in the writing, the lyrics, the guitar solos, the attitude. I remember when it came time to put down guitar solos, I listened to all the stuff that I used to listen to as a teenager: a lot of UFO, DEEP PURPLE and RAINBOW, VAN HALEN's first album, Pat Travers. Initially I was shocked, because I found myself being re-inspired by all this stuff that influenced me back in the day, and it opened up my playing all over again. When I applied that attitude and brought that inspiration to the new songs I got some incredible results right off the bat. The self-referencing was working, and we weren't just copying ourselves. I really felt that we were going somewhere fresh and new."

Lars: "Reconnecting with the past was something that definitely happened organically. Rick spends a lot of time just hanging out and talking about music, and during the first few months, he made us comfortable about revisiting and being inspired by some of the records that we put out in the '80s: 'Ride The Lightning', 'Master Of Puppets', '…And Justice For All'. When we finished 'Justice', we felt there was nothing more to do on that progressive, thrashy side of METALLICA, so we spent the better part of the '90s running as far away from those records as we could. Rick made us feel okay about revisiting those records. We started the creative process for 'Death Magnetic' in the summer of 2006, which was when the 'Master Of Puppets' 20th anniversary was going down and we played that whole record live all over Europe and Asia. We got under the skin of 'Master Of Puppets' right as we started writing these new songs for 'Death Magnetic'. And that certainly made us feel comfortable about embracing some of the things that we had done in the '80s for the first time in 15 years. It's been interesting. Rick would suggest: 'Listen to the same records that you listened to in the '80s, or try and write the same way.' It was never: 'Copy what you were doing musically.' It was: 'Put yourself in that headspace.' And it felt really good to do that, finally. We avoided going there for so long, but when we finally went back, it was like: 'Yeah, we can hang out here — we can be inspired by those records and feel good about it.'"

Rob: "It seems like the band, over the past ten or 15 years, has been trying to get away from the early years. And for me, coming into METALLICA, I love everything that METALLICA's done, but I really, really love the old-school stuff. And just the fact that the guys were open to that was a real positive thing. Rick was very clever, even in the tuning of the songs. 'Why does METALLICA have everything tuned down a half step, or a whole step? Why doesn't METALLICA tune the way they did on 'Master Of Puppets'?' And so we ended up trying the songs in natural tune, and that's great — James can still sing his ass off, and there's a bit more angst to the vocal. I really like what James did. A lot of positive things came from Rick."

Read the entire interview from iafrica.com.