Metallica released Hardwired…to Self-Destruct on November 18, 2016, through their own Blackened Recordings. Their tenth studio album followed 2008’s Death Magnetic with 12 songs spread across two CDs. Nearly 80 minutes of music emerged from a process that involved sorting through years of ideas, reconsidering arrangements and writing a crucial opening track late in the sessions.
Greg Fidelman produced the album with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, recording and mixing at the band’s HQ in San Rafael, California, between May 2015 and August 2016. Working at HQ also let the musicians fit sessions around school runs and family life. In a January 2017 appearance on Song Exploder, Ulrich explained that choice and traced the writing back to an iPod containing roughly 1,500 musical ideas. He had spent the summer of 2014 reviewing those recordings. Among the fragments he selected was a riff called “Plow,” which became part of “Moth Into Flame.”
That song grew around two contrasting riffs: one with more notes, the other built around Hetfield’s downpicking. As they assembled it, Hetfield and Ulrich looked to “Disposable Heroes” for an arrangement lesson. A guitar melody before the chorus could interrupt the run of vocals and give the music room to speak. They adapted that approach for “Moth Into Flame,” then changed the melody’s guitar tone on its third appearance to give the repeated section a different intensity. Hetfield described the lyrics as a warning about fame’s pull, informed by the excesses he had experienced and the people he had seen lost along the way.
The opening song came from a more immediate need. Hetfield told MusicRadar in December 2016 that the band had needed more variety after working through their accumulated material. Looking over the album near the end of the process, they decided it needed a more forceful opening. “Hardwired” came together quickly to fill that space. Hetfield wanted “something really in your face-style,” and the new song became both the album opener and its first single. It was released alongside the album announcement in August 2016.
Kirk Hammett left room for instinct in his solos, too. In the same interview, he described preparing little beyond keys and scales before playing. He found the results less predictable than leads he had worked out months before recording.
The release campaign gave listeners a way through the whole double album before it reached stores. After issuing videos for “Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame” and “Atlas, Rise!,” Metallica rolled out the remaining clips at two-hour intervals on November 16 and 17. Every album track received a video, as did the deluxe edition’s “Lords of Summer.” The premieres ran through the band’s website and media partners around the world, making the deeper cuts part of the launch alongside the singles. The campaign also reached independent record shops: almost 100 stores worldwide stayed open overnight for the release, with prizes and exclusive items accompanying the arrival of the LPs and CDs.
Hardwired…to Self-Destruct debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It became Metallica’s sixth album to top that chart.
