Hardwired… to Self‐Destruct by Metallica

Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, Metallica's tenth studio album, arrived as a double album on November 18, 2016, on the band's own Blackened Recordings, eight years after Death Magnetic and the longest the band had ever gone between studio records. Greg Fidelman, who engineered and mixed Death Magnetic, took the producer's chair, and the same four walked in: James Hetfield on guitar and lead vocals, Lars Ulrich on drums, Kirk Hammett on guitar and Robert Trujillo on bass.

The title track is a fast, snarling blast that picks up the thrash thread Death Magnetic had rediscovered, and "Atlas, Rise!" charges along on riffs that could have been cut in the band's youth. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, the sixth Metallica studio album in a row to do that, shifting 291,000 album-equivalent units out of the gate and landing at the top in 57 countries, and critics were mostly kind.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.