Metallica Make Travel Bags, Confuse Cliff Burton Fans
If you’ve been on Metallica’s Instagram page in the past 24 hours, you’ve probably seen this logo, gotten really excited, and then instantly become totally confused:
Alas, this is not part of some new tribute to late ‘Tallica bassist Cliff Burton… it’s a team-up with a sporting goods and travel gear company called Burton.
Offerings from the collaboration include snowboards, snowboard bindings, jackets, beanies, a hip pack, and this $380 travel bag, which is made to look like the road cases the band takes on tour:
Incidentally, this gives me an idea for a romantic comedy about two young metalheads who meet when they accidentally grab one another’s Metallica travel bags at the luggage carousel after flying to Wacken. It’s like Serendipty with Slayer! If you’d like to finance this film please contact my agent.
You can shop the Metallica/Burton-but-not-Cliff Burton collection here.
Metallica will be the featured musical guests on an episode of The Late Show with Steven Colbert set to this Wednesday, March 3. The broadcast begins at 11:35pm EST on CBS.
Metallica previously joined Colbert just a few weeks ago on a special edition of the show that aired directly after the Super Bowl. The band’s set was pre-recorded from an undisclosed location in the Bay Area, and featured a number of custom amplifier cabinets in the background. You can catch up on their performance of “Enter Sandman” at the bottom of this post, in case you missed it.
Metallica are currently deep into “some pretty serious writing” for their next album. After first floating the idea of working on new music while under quarantine in April, by June Lars Ulrich had revealed that Metallica were, indeed, in writing mode. James and Rob have both said they’ve been busy working on new songs, too, and Kirk Hammett has trumpeted the fact that he has over 600 song ideas recorded (after infamously losing his cell phone with 300+ ideas prior to the sessions for the band’s last album, Hardwired… To Self-Destruct). The band were having some technical issues collaborating over the internet and were looking into doing so in-person in a bubble last they checked in, but that was months ago already, and Lars recently revealed that new material was coming along at a “glacial” pace.
Otherwise, Metallica have managed to stay very busy during the pandemic, racking up over a billion Spotify streams in 2020 alone. In May, they released a semi-acoustic, reimagined version of “Blackened.” Then, in August, they hosted a pre-recorded drive-in concert at hundreds of outdoor movie theaters and released a recording of last year’s S&M2 concert. A re-worked version of “Nothing Else Matters” is scheduled to appear in Disney’s upcoming Jungle Cruise movie starring The Rock and Emily Blunt. And the band hosted a virtual charity concert in November to benefit their All Within My Hands foundation, raising over $1.3 million.
