Video: Metallica Premiere New Song, “The Lords of Summer”

March 17th, 2014 at 10:00am
Axl Rosenberg

As promised, Metallica debuted a new song last night during their performance in Bogotá, Colombia. It’s called “The Lords of Summer,” and it would fit right in on Death Magnetic, which is to say, it’s striving pretty hard to sound like old school Metallica, and not doing a very good job. Sure, the riff ain’t bad, but it’s redundant and too long (eight-minutes-plus) for a song that really goes nowhere, the chorus is soaked in Hetfield’s post-Black Album “Wom-AH-n!” vocals, etc.

Of course, it’s important to note that just because Metallica played the song live doesn’t mean it will end up on the finished album, or appear on that album in precisely the form in which it appears here. Remember that in 2006, the band played this untitled new song on most (if not all) of the “Escape from the Studio” tour…