The legendary American heavy metal band Metallica announced on Monday, November 28, the release in April 2023 of a new studio album and a tour of Europe and North America in 2023 and 2024. The album 72 Seasons will be released on April 14, 2023 and will be immediately followed by concerts in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Paris (Stade de France on May 17 and 19), Hamburg (Germany), then Sweden, according to press releases from Metallica and the giant ticketing and Live Nation entertainment.

This will be followed, from August to November 2023, by concerts in the United States and Canada (Los Angeles, Phoenix, Detroit, Montreal, etc.) before returning to the Old Continent from May 2024 (Munich, Helsinki, Warsaw, Madrid…), then again in North America (Chicago, Seattle, Mexico…) until September 2024.

The California quartet, whose founding members like James Hetfield, 59, and Danish drummer Lars Ulrich, 58, have been playing and performing for forty years, promised two concerts at each of the stops with a different show each day.

Their twelfth studio album – the first since 2016 – features twelve tracks, one of which, Lux Aeternawas unveiled on Monday.

“To be prisoners of our childhood or to free ourselves from these bonds”

According to James Hetfield, the title of 72 Seasons refers to “first eighteen years of our lives that form our true or false self”.

“Our parents told us ‘who we are’ (…). Much of our adult experience is replaying or reacting to our childhood experiences. To be prisoners of our childhood or to free ourselves from these bonds”writes the American singer, who, in four decades of career, broke with a number of excesses and addictions and even conducted psychotherapy with his group, recounted in a documentary in 2001 (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster).

With the power of metal sound, Metallica had awakened in September a New York charity concert for the climate and against poverty by a dozen American and European artists organized in Central Park, in the heart of Manhattan, by the American NGO GlobalCitizen.