Metallica share 'Black Album 2021?' teaser

It looks like Metallica will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of their iconic Black Album this year.

The band's massive fifth LP was released back on August 12, 1991, and with the 30th anniversary approaching in just a couple of months, they seem to be gearing up for… something.

Sharing a video of a live performance of Wherever I May Roam from San Diego in 1992 on their social media accounts over the weekend, Loudwire reports that Metallica had captioned the posts with the hashtag #ComingThisFall. That has apparently since been deleted, so now the posts just say #BlackAlbum2021? with no indication of a date. Still, that in itself is already exciting enough…

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Of course, Metallica are no strangers to celebratory releases for special occasions, so a deluxe reissue or something along those lines could very well be on the cards. The band will also be back on the road later this year for a series of special U.S. festival headline performances, so some album-in-full sets might be likely…

In other ’Tallica news, earlier this month James Hetfield said that the band have written "quite a few songs" in lockdown.

"Whatever you call it these days – I guess it’s an album, a CD, a group of songs, a collection, whatever, a stream or however you get your music now," Papa Het revealed. "But, yeah, a bunch of songs. We wrote quite a few songs. So we’ll see how many we like first, and then we’ll put ’em out. We’re pretty selfish that way; we like what we write as well.”

Explaining how this material was written remotely, the frontman said that they initially "started doing a weekly Zoom with those guys, just to check in”.

"And then I just told them one time, 'Hey, I’m gonna write something. I’m just gonna play something and send it to you guys. You do whatever you want with it and see what happens and layer on to it.’ So that’s how we did a version of Blackened 2020. I just basically played something. They hadn’t heard it before. They played on it. Then it kind of got layered together.

"Then we started experimenting with writing on Zoom. Lars and I would get together, or Kirk [Hammett, guitar] and Lars [Ulrich, drums], and we would get little bits of time here and there writing. It was difficult because of the delay in the sound, so we couldn’t actually play together, but we would play to a click track and watch each other play.

"We had our producer, who was running my computer while I was playing. He was running my computer from LA, and I’m in Vail [Colorado]. And then Lars had an assistant running his computer from LA – he’s up here in San Francisco – and we were playing together, and it was pretty bizarre. We started writing. We got about – I don’t know – over 10 songs going that way. And then we finally got together. There’s only so much you can do on Zoom."

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