San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New album, world tour for Metallica on horizon
Metallica has confirmed the title and release date for its 12th studio album.
The forthcoming “72 Seasons” is expected to be available in multiple formats on April 14, and the band plans to support the album with a twoyear M72 World Tour. What’s more, each stop includes includes two-night stints in each city the band visits, including No Repeat Weekend sets featuring two different set lists and opening act lineups. (There are no Bay Area dates currently on the schedule.)
Produced by Greg Fidelman, frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, the group’s follow-up to 2016’s “Hardwired … to Self-Destruct” contains 12 tracks and clocks in at 77 minutes.
“72 seasons. The first 18 years of our lives that form our true or false selves. The concept that we were told ‘who we are’ by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are. I think the most interesting part of this is the continued study of those core beliefs and how it affects our perception of the world today,” Hetfield said in a statement, explaining the idea behind the band’s latest work. “Much of our adult experience is reenactment or reaction to these childhood experiences. Prisoners of childhood or breaking free of those bondages we carry.”
Two-day tickets — with discounts for fans younger than age 16 — are on sale now, while single-day tickets will be available beginning Jan. 20. The band emphasized the only place to get passes for the concerts is www.metallica.com/ m72-info.
Metallica, which headlined this year’s BottleRock Napa Valley music festival, is warning its fans not to fall for a series of cryptocurrency scams surrounding the album release announcement. The veteran Bay Area hard rock band said that several impostor YouTube accounts using its name are tricking people with fake giveaways, claiming to offer “Metallica Crypto.”
“Let’s be as clear as possible. These are scams,” read an Instagram post from Metallica’s official account.
The band’s post came after a 51-year-old Kansas man was reportedly scammed by a fake Metallica YouTube channel into transferring approximately $25,500 of Bitcoin to an unknown person, according to WIBV-TV.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a warning about the rise of cryptocurrency scams. The bulletin said that since 2021, more than 46,000 people have reported losing more than $1 billion in crypto to scams. It added that $4 out of every $10 reported lost to a fraud originating on social media was lost in crypto, “far more than any other payment method.”
The band’s advisory went on to note that “all of our official social media channels are verified” and that fans should check for “official verification before believing something wild and crazy to be true.”