Metallica Has Released a Video for Every Song on Their New Album

Vinyl Bay 777 gives you a brief rundown of every video from ‘Hardwired… to Self-Destruct’

Metallica is about to release their 10^th studio album, ‘Hardwired… to Self-Destruct,’ this Friday, November 18. Their first in more than eight years, the band has been teasing every last bit out of the album for months.

Now, the band has released music videos for every song on the album. While videos for the first three singles were released in September and October, Wednesday saw a push to release the other nine.

To whet your appetite for holding the album in your hands, here are all 12 videos, in track order, plus the live video for “Lords of Summer,” in one place for your viewing pleasure.

1.       “Hardwired”: The video for the album’s title track is just as flighty as the song itself. It doesn’t hold on to one particular shot for longer than a second or two until the end. Its manic and frantic, and a good place for the album to start.

2.       “Atlas, Rise”: Metallica give you a behind the scenes look at their recording process in this video. Here, you see the band in the studio working on the song, playing things out, riffing off each other, mixing and just having fun in general.

3.        “Now That We’re Dead”: The video is pretty simple at first. It features the band playing in front of a white background with a lot of close-ups. Then the band’s faces start to get gnarled up. The visual starts to look like the album cover, with multiple images of their faces stacked on top of one another.

4.       “Moth Into Flame”: This video has three views. One is the camera’s view of the band playing in a black room. The second is the viewer watching the band play through the television screen. The third is the moths, who are swarming near the television’s light, seeing the band play through their kaleidoscope-like eyes.

5.        “Dream No More”: Much of this video looks like stock footage with a man in a black body suit superimposed over the scenes. This person-sized black screen serves as director Tom Kirk’s way of splicing the band’s performance scenes into these stock backgrounds.

6.        “Halo On Fire”: The main story of this video focuses on a girl who looks like she has been bruised in some way, physically and/or mentally, as she cleans herself up and leaves her house to face the world. However, we soon find out that she is battered because she is a fighter and knocking out all her opponents in each street fight. She is not the angel people on the street perceive her as.

7.       “Confusion”: This video follows the song pretty closely with imagery of a former soldier with PTSD  having flashbacks of being on the battlefield. The drum roll in the beginning is the perfect introduction to opening patrol scenes while the lyrics to the song appropriately detail her flashbacks.

8.        “ManUNkind”: The band takes on whole new personalities for this one. In this video, we see a band (not sure if it’s actually Metallica)playing on a small stage wearing ‘Scarecrow’-like face paint, cutting themselves and worshiping pig heads. The crowd below them loves every minute of it, soaking up the blood dripped on their faces and devouring the pig heads tossed in to them. Note: If you don’t like blood, do NOT watch.

9.       Here Comes Revenge”: Beautifully illustrated, this video seems like a meditation on karma. Doing this through the personification of animals, it follows a hyena that is looking to put a new trophy animal on his wall. However, after he does so, he is haunted by his former kills, who come back to life to kill him instead.

10.   “Am I Savage”: This video displays vignettes of a man’s daily interactions with the same nameless and faceless (literally) people day in and day out. He puts on a brave face, but inside he is going insane.

11.    “Murder One”: This is the band’s tribute to Lemmy from Motorhead. It’s a cartoon adventure of the late singer where he attempts to get revenge on his old band Hawkwind and just blowing things up in general. The general take away is that Lemmy is the personification of rock and roll.

12.   “Spit Out the Bone”: Perhaps the weirdest of all the videos, director Phil Mucci brings you to a blood-soaked, destroyed dystopian world the human race is threatened by alien lasers that disintegrate flesh. Interspersed between people running are images of skulls and robots covered in worms. The story is aided by choreographed fight scenes and cheesy special effects.

13.    “Lords of Summer”: This live video gives you a peak at what goes on behind the scenes of a Metallica arena show, as well as the energy that comes from the stage and from the audience. There is so much enjoyment going on both on-stage and in the crowd that it makes you want to see the band live.

‘Hardwired… to Self-Destruct’ comes out on Friday, November 18. On that day, the band will be holding various “Blackened Friday” events, where fans who come down to participating record stores will be eligible to receive limited edition items and a grand prize featuring the album in deluxe box set form with test pressing.

Pre-order the album here and here, and find more music from Metallica in-store at Vinyl Bay 777 and online at vinylbay777.com.