Metallica Announce S&M2 Live Album
Back in 1999, Metallica surprised fans by collaborating live with the San Francisco Symphony to give their heavy metal songs an orchestral flare. They made that performance into a live album called “S&M”.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the album, they went back to play with the Symphony in 2019. The band has just announced it will be releasing another live album to commemorate that performance. The album will be called S&M2 and it will be coming out on August 28.
News of the album was announced earlier this week when singer James Hetfield released an audio segment saying, “Hey, this is James from Metallica. Tune in on Wednesday to hear new Metallica music from S&M2”.
The music Hetfield was referring to was the teaser releases of the songs, “Nothing Else Matters” and “All Within My Hands” which is available on the band’s Youtube channel as of yesterday. While Hetfield didn’t offer much information in his message, Lars Ulrich announced back in June that Metallica would be releasing a box set of the S&M2 shows later this summer. It is likely these songs are the first two singles off the album.
The S&M 2019 performances took place in September of last year and lasted two nights. These would be the last performances Metallica has played thus far. Since then, the remainder of their tour was cancelled due to Hetfield going to rehab. Any plans to tour since then were squashed by the coronavirus.
In addition to the new music, a home version of the concert film will also be available to fans. The concerts were screened in cinemas for one night only on October 9, 2019. New edits have been made to the film for the home release. A trailer from the film was also released July 15.
When the box set comes out it will be available in a wide range of formats including 4xLP vinyl, 2xCD, DVD and Blu-Ray. There will also be limited color vinyl available as well as a special edition Blu-Ray Deluxe Box. Pre-order is available on the band’s web site.
In other news, Metallica are reportedly working on completely new original music during the lockdown so we can look forward to hearing that as well. Lars Ulrich was recently interviewed and gave fans some insight as to what’s going on in the Metallica camp.
“We’re just starting, in the last four weeks maybe, we connected again. We’ve been obviously connecting (even before that) but we (have now) connected creatively and we’re sort of in discovery mode, I think is a good way to say it. We are sending ideas to each other via email and via Zoom and (trying to) make music in these unusual situations.”
Although Metallica is notorious for having a painstakingly slow songwriting process, the fact that they are being productive is good news and we hope to be hearing new music from them sooner rather than later. Take a listen to S&M2 to get your fix in the meantime.
