METALLICA – If Darkness Had a Son [EP] (2023) , MP3+FLAC

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Back in November, metal titans METALLICA announced ‘72 Seasons‘, their 11th studio album and the long-awaited follow-up to their 2016 LP, Hardwired… To Self Destruct. The new album will be released in April. With the announcement came the release of the LP’s thrashin’ lead single, ”Lux Æterna”, a tune that was followed up in January by the wah-laden scorcher, ”Screaming Suicide”.

Now, band is releasing the third single, the classically Metallica sounding ”If Darkness Had a Son”. With a martial groove from drummer Lars Ulrich, mammoth low-end work by Robert Trujillo on bass guitar, an ominous, thundering riff and a lightning-like, expressive solo – colored, naturally, in its opening bars, with some tasty wah pedal work – from Kirk Hammett, ”If Darkness Had a Son” shows the metal A-listers leaning into their strengths, to great effect.

“72 seasons. The first 18 years of our lives that form our true or false selves,” frontman James Hetfield wrote of the album’s theme last November. “The concept that we were told ‘who we are’ by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are. ”
That theme even carries through to the album’s artwork, which prominently features the charred remains of a late-’80s Fernandes LE-1 Strat copy, a likely homage to the Fernandes FST-135 (nicknamed ‘Edna’) that Hammett used early in Metallica’s career.

01 – If Darkness Had a Son
02 – Lux Æterna
03 – Screaming Suicide

James Heatfiled
Lars Ulrich
Robert Trujillo
Kirk Hammett

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