You would have thought that Lars Ulrich and his bandmates might have eaten a bit of humble pie after the disastrous flop that was their collaboration record with Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed – Lulu.
But then of course you have to remember of course that we’re talking about Metallica, the band that proclaimed that “everytime we put a record out, we lose people that can’t deal with the growth.”
Naturally the band are trying to put Lulu behind them, although Ulrich continues to maintain that the record is really quite good – “It’s definitely very unique, whether in a good way or in a not-so-good way,” he says. “The people whose opinions I trust say it’s very good.”
“I just saw some piece in, I think it was the LA Weekly or something, somebody sent me, talking about how the actual real album of 2011 was ‘Lulu’, but nobody is gonna recognise it for another 20 years. So, one by one, they’re crumbling.”
But despite the embarassing sales figures from Lulu – 15,000 copies in it’s first week of release compared to 490,000 for 2008 Metallica’s Death Magnetic and 418,000 copies for 2003′s St Anger – Ulrich has told Spin that the band feel more free than ever to experiment and do what they want.
“We’re free and clear of our record contract. The world’s our oyster. We can basically do whatever we want. And we’re going to start figuring that out,” Ulrich said.
“We’re writing music and we’re going to be recording very soon. At some point we’re going to want to share that with people that are interested in listening to it. So we gotta figure out ways we want to do that. We could come up with something wacky.”
“This whole thing about who can come up with the coolest [release strategy] so it can be written about on 12 different blogs for six hours — I mean sure, that’s all pretty cool and hip. But at the same time you have to remember we have a very global audience.”
“We have fans in India and the U.A.E. and Russia. In a lot of these places there are still more conventional ways of getting music to people. We have to think of the whole globe to try to find the right balance”.
Whatever Metallica come up with next let’s just hope Ulrich doesn’t consult his ‘trusted friends’. We all know how that ended.
