Metallica’s video for their new track, “Hardwired,” is dark and menacing, with each of the four band members seen in stroboscopic flashes of light as the cameras swirl around them.
In this new making-of clip, the band reveals how they created the video in a high school gym in San Rafael, California.
Metallica released “Hardwired” on August 18 and gave the song its debut live performance at their show in Minneapolis two days later. The song is the lead track from their new album, Hardwired…to Self-Destruct, which comes out November 18.
“That’s actually the last song we wrote for the record,” Ulrich told RollingStone.com. “We started this album by throwing different ideas around. The shape of it, as a collection of songs, didn’t come into focus until we were deep into it. At that point, the songs were getting tighter, shorter and leaner.
“A couple of months ago, we were sitting there taking stock of the record and thought maybe we should write one more fast, little crazy song, and that became ‘Hardwired.’ It just kind of happened. I think James and I wrote and recorded it in less than a week, which, for us, is basically a nanosecond.”
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Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
