Lux Æterna

I don't want to sound too cynical and bring up irrelevant reasons why I dislike Metallica as people, but musically this is the biggest example of the band just not giving a shit, going through the motions, writing on autopilot (or even using AI, it wouldn't surprise me). Here we have zero substance, nothing new but also nothing really classic, but of course when it released the millions upon millions of Metallica fans blindly dropped their pants for it, claiming it was a return to the band's Kill 'Em All era. Wasn't the whole appeal of Kill 'Em All the attitude, the grit and the aggression? Lux Æterna has none of these things, the main riff is ultimately thrash metal in form, but it's so annoyingly weak and contrived that it sounds like a beginner trying to learn Chosen Ones by Megadeth, getting it completely wrong and recording it anyway. On top of that, the production is sterile and overly digitalised, there is no sense of cohesion or passion like the early days of Metallica, I don't even really see the point of the comparison.

I showed the recent Metallica singles to a girl and she said it sounds like old people trying to play rock music. Sure, that's exactly what it is, but she's right in that it feels so forced and lifeless, desperate to recycle any sense of the music that plunged the band into huge success in the first place. Firstly, the vocals and lyrics are atrocious. Remember some time in the 90s when James Hetfield forgot how to do proper vocals, and has been singing cleanly with plenty of out of tune melodies and laughable delivery ever since? He hasn't unlearned how to do that yet. As for the lyrics, it sounds like Rob Halford's early nonsense lyrics except James can't pull it off convincingly. Forget trying to tell a story, let's sing about rockin' 'n' rollin' and making sure the last word of every line ends with "ation" because lyrics are automatically good if they rhyme, right?

This last point solidifies my main problem with this single and the last 3 decades of Metallica in general; making commercial music is fine, but Metallica has constantly toed this awkward line of trying to sound heavy to please the old fans, and failing miserably because they also try to sound soft and accessible for the bigger, stadium-filling audiences. The result is a mess, the guitar work sounds like blues rock with little more than lazy chromatic sequences and about 5 separate notes in the entire song. Obviously a lot of people like this. Whether that's because the song is actually halfway decent or just because the Metallica "M" is planted on the cover, I don't really care. But you're not missing anything if you skip this, you've heard it all before and this song will only leave you disappointed.