Metallica have announced ReLoad (Remastered), due June 26 via their own Blackened Recordings label. The album was remastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering with Greg Fidelman overseeing.
A limited-edition deluxe box set is available for pre-order now. The package includes the remastered album on 180g double vinyl, a “The Memory Remains” 7″, and Live At Ministry Of Sound ’97 on 140g triple vinyl. Beyond the records, the box contains 15 CDs — ranging from the remastered album to never-before-released riff collections, demos, rough mixes, B-sides, and live material — plus 4 DVDs covering behind-the-scenes footage, in-studio content, live performances, on-air appearances, the band’s pop-up at the CoreStates Complex Parking Lot in Philadelphia, and Seoul visits. Memorabilia includes 13 Rorschach Test cards, an 11×17 Gimme Fuel poster, a sticker, a Pushead print, a 10-pack of guitar/bass picks, lyric sheets, three laminated tour passes, and a 128-page book with never-before-seen photos.
Pre-orders receive instant-grat versions of “The Memory Remains” including the remastered original, an instrumental mix, and a live Brisbane recording. The video for “The Memory Remains (Live in Philadelphia)” is out now.
Pre-order the album here.
Alongside the release, Metallica are launching the #GetTheReLoadOut fan cover competition — the follow-up to last year’s #GetTheLoadOut campaign. This round adds a second category: performance and visual artists are invited to participate alongside musicians. A different album track will be highlighted weekly, with two Grand Prize Winners each taking home a Metallica-autographed deluxe box set.
Originally released November 18, 1997, ReLoad debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — the third consecutive Metallica album to do so — spent nearly 80 weeks on the chart, and topped the charts in six countries. The 1995–1997 sessions at The Plant in Sausalito, California that produced both Load and ReLoad saw James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Jason Newsted deliberately expanding the band’s sonic terrain. Notable moments on ReLoad include hurdy-gurdy and violin on “Low Man’s Lyric” and a guest vocal from Marianne Faithfull on “The Memory Remains.”
The Load/ReLoad era has remained the most debated chapter in Metallica‘s catalog. Ulrich addressed the criticism directly in a 2013 interview with Revolver: “Load and ReLoad are great records that are creatively on par with every other record we’ve made. Obviously, they’re bluesier records, and at that time, we were listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and AC/DC, and we had a different kind of foundation than records before or after. And I understand that there are people who couldn’t quite figure out what was going on with the haircuts and the rest of it, and that’s fine. But musically, if you strip all that other stuff away, if you just listen to the 27 songs — Load and ReLoad were intended as one double record — it’s a great collection of songs that is on par with everything else that we’ve done creatively.”
Hetfield has been more conflicted. In a 2017 interview with Clash, he said: “As far as doing something that doesn’t feel right, I’m sure there’s been a few times that it’s happened — the Load and ReLoad era, for me, was one of those; the way that was looking, I wasn’t 100 percent on with it, but I would say that that was a compromise. I said, ‘I’m going with Lars‘s and Kirk‘s vision on this. You guys are extremely passionate about this, so I’ll jump on board, because if the four of us are into it, it’s going to be better.’ So I did my best with it, and it didn’t pan out as good as I was hoping, but, again, there’s no regrets, because at the time it felt like the right thing to do.”
In a 2016 conversation with TeamRock, Hetfield speculated on what late bassist Cliff Burton might have made of the band’s aesthetic shifts in the ’90s: “Well, I certainly would have thought there would have been some resistance, for sure. I think the ‘Black Album’ was a great album and I appreciate the fact that we did have the balls to do that… I would certainly think that the Load and ReLoad [era], I would have had an ally that was very against it all — the reinvention or the U2 version of Metallica.”
