Metallica, still thrashing but comfortably adult

Although its 12 songs clock in at under 78 minutes, it's being released Friday (Nov 18) as a double album

A packed, sweaty, ready-to-mosh crowd greeted Metallica in September at Webster Hall in Manhattan — a rare chance to see the band in a club rather than an arena — for a set including two songs from “Hardwired ... to Self-Destruct,” the band’s first studio album in eight years. “Eight years went by fast,” said a grinning James Hetfield, the band’s singer, rhythm guitarist and lyricist. “But not for you, I guess.”

The set included two songs from the new album that rev up to the punky, speed-metal tempos of 1980s Metallica: “Hardwired,” with a chorus delivering unbridled pessimism in four-letter words, and “Moth Into Flame,” a tirade at the corrosive effects of fame and social media: “Infamy, all for publicity/Destruction going viral.”

Songs about rage, mayhem, madness and annihilation are business as usual for Metallica on “Hardwired ... to Self-Destruct.” It’s Metallica’s 10th studio album, its first on its own Blackened Recordings label and its first since “Death Magnetic” in 2008. Although its 12 songs clock in at under 78 minutes, which means they could be squeezed onto a single CD, it’s being released Friday (Nov 18) as a double album — a grander statement.

By phone from Paris on Tuesday, Hetfield said that in his latest lyrics: “A lot of it is tongue-in-cheek, a lot of it is cynicism. As an adult, you get to stand back and see what is happening in the world, and put your 2 cents in.” Metallica has embraced its adulthood, reclaiming the attack of its music while jettisoning the image of a hard-rock band as young, fast and out of control.

“We’re a bunch of fairly happy-go-lucky people who, when we get together, there’s a lot of energy that happens in the music,” said Lars Ulrich, the band’s drummer, who writes the songs with Hetfield. “James certainly acknowledges that he carries a lot of things within him. But I think it’s still possible to make energetic, thrashy music without necessarily walking around being these sulky, angry, sullen, dark people with black cartoon thunderstorms over their heads.”

Band members have gone through rehab and group therapy, making the process public in the 2004 film “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” which showed the band working through entrenched hostilities to record an album. Its members are now settled family men who separate life and art.

“Back in the day, making records and touring was pretty much the only thing that was going on,” Ulrich said by phone from his home in San Francisco. “Now the band is basically secondary to our families, to our domestic needs, to our attempts at keeping our sanity checked. We have a whole way of doing things that may not be the most efficient if people are counting the days until the next record. But in terms of keeping the band somewhat sane and keeping the collective healthy, it’s a different model.”

For the new album, Metallica polished a style it has honed for 35 years, ever since Hetfield answered an ad placed by Ulrich to start the band. Hetfield howls his tidings of looming catastrophe over a fastidious, fine-tuned thrust and roar; Ulrich’s drums, Hetfield’s rhythm guitar and Robert Trujillo’s bass hurtle through riff after riff, fast and hard, behind Hetfield’s muscular growl and Kirk Hammett’s screaming, wriggling lead guitar solos. Instead of reinventing itself for this album, Metallica subtly tightened up, notching up the amount of melody in guitars and vocals and trying to limit sprawling songs.

“There was this strange thing for many years in our band,” Ulrich said. “We were in such a hurry to move forward, and in such a hurry to move away from certain perceptions about us, that we kept chasing something that we didn’t really need to chase.”

He was referring to the albums — often reviled by longtime fans — that Metallica made between its 1991 blockbuster, “Metallica” (usually known as “The Black Album”), which sold 16 million copies worldwide, and “Death Magnetic,” on which producer Rick Rubin persuaded the band to embrace its past.

With the release of “Death Magnetic,” Metallica toured for three years, but at a manageable, adult pace. “We basically don’t leave the house for more than two weeks at a time,” Ulrich said. “There’s almost a whole European soccer team between us in terms of the kids, and we like to see them every couple of weeks. So a tour takes a bit longer than it did when we used to play 26 shows in 29 days.”

Orion Music and More

After its main three-year tour, Metallica also put together two of its own ambitious (and unprofitable) Orion Music and More festivals. For much of 2011, they collaborated with Lou Reed on his last album, “Lulu.” In 2013, the band performed on all seven continents, “including Antarctica,” Hetfield noted.

Work on “Hardwired ... to Self-Destruct” started in 2014. Songwriting for Metallica is like “a giant jigsaw puzzle,” Ulrich said. The band records everything: shows, rehearsals, soundchecks, backstage jam sessions. Then it selects riffs and melodies and starts to fit them together.

“There’s just so much material that we accumulate, all the time,” Ulrich said. “James Hetfield, every time he turns his amp on, it’s: ‘Wait a minute, stop, did somebody record that riff? Put an X next to the thing he played at 2.37 pm, because it was awesome.’”

Ulrich spent the summer of 2014 with an iPod holding “every single note that we’d recorded since ‘Death Magnetic'” — some 1,500 tracks. Many were labelled by the city they were recorded in; the album has riffs from Chicago; Vilnius, Lithuania; and Glastonbury, England.

In September, Ulrich said, “I walked into the studio with 30 ideas from that iPod. I thought, ‘This sounds like a good place to pop a blister,’ and we just threw ourselves at it.” They recorded at Metallica HQ, their rehearsal studio in San Rafael, California. On “Death Magnetic,” songs had stretched out; this time, when the band found itself pushing toward extremes, it made an effort to “rein this in,” Ulrich said. “There was more of a conscious effort to tighten the songs up, make them leaner.”

There’s still musical friction in the band, Hetfield noted. “Song length — Lars and I argue about that constantly,” he said. “It’s not that he wants longer songs, but it’s hard for him to trim anything down.” The band was nearly done with the album when it decided, Hetfield recalled, that “There’s no opening song — there’s nothing that really kicks you in the face right off.” Instead of reopening what Hetfield called the “Pandora’s box” of riffs, the songwriters started from scratch, as in their early days, and ended up with “Hardwired.”

“We wrote it on a Monday and Tuesday, and tweaked it on Wednesday and recorded it on Thursday,” Ulrich recalled. After two painstaking years, “It was great to just knock a song like that out of the park superquick,” he said. “Hopefully that’s a good indication of the next record.” “We did it,” Hetfield said. “I got my short song.”