Metallica’s Kirk Hammett loves Toronto — but he won’t be playing here anytime soon

Metallica fans, there is some good news and some bad news.

First, the positive stuff: to support “72 Seasons,” which was released Friday, the San Francisco heavy rock band’s 11th studio album and first since 2016’s “Hardwired … to Self-Destruct,” singer and guitarist James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, bass player Robert Trujillo and drummer Lars Ulrich are heading back on the road again.

They’re playing a pair of shows in each location and calling them “No Repeat Weekends” — each concert will be totally different from the first and each appearance will offer a different pair of opening acts. Dates, restricted to about 13 locations per year around the world, have already been announced for 2023 and 2024.

Not so positive: Kirk Hammett told the Star it will be a minimum of three years before Toronto sees them … and maybe even longer.

“Probably sometime after those two tour legs,” Hammett, 60, said last week during a phone interview. “As it stands nowadays, because we’re just older and we have other lives, we can only tour for a certain amount of time every year.

“So what we’re trying to do is just pace ourselves and schedule so many shows. This way, we’re able to play these shows well and take care of everything else in our lives.

“You know, Toronto is definitely on the list,” added Hammett, whose band last filled the Rogers Centre in 2017. “And we will get there eventually … but not in the next couple of years, I’m sorry to say. I just want you to know, I love Toronto. I love the city and have spent time there, had a few shows there and the Wedding Band (Hammett’s side project) has played there. It’s just a great, great place.”

For now, the closest that the nine-time Grammy-winning outfit will appear is Montreal’s Olympic Stadium Aug. 11 and 13 (as you might imagine, resale tickets that aren’t nosebleeds are going for low four figures each), or Detroit Ford Field Nov. 10 and 12 (still plenty of affordable tickets available, even with the U.S. exchange rate). You could also try Chicago’s Soldier Field in 2024. (Metallica’s only Canadian appearance next year will be in Edmonton.)

While the band that has sold more than 100 million albums since forming in 1981 is limiting its road warrior status, they aren’t slowing down when it comes to the music itself: “72 Seasons” is a 77-minute slamming opus that includes the typical pulverizing rhythms and molten lead guitar solos that fans continue to embrace.

Singer Hetfield writes all the lyrics and the loose concept for the album this time around is that “72 Seasons” represents the 18 years it takes for someone to begin to know and grow into their true selves.

In a way, it’s almost a sequel to “Hardwired … to Self-Destruct,” offering a bit more hope in its insightful and reflective prose.

Can Hammett relate?

“I can totally relate to James’s lyrics,” he replied. “One thing that James and I share is that we had a super dysfunctional childhood. We share a lot of the same issues.

“When I hear his lyrics, I embrace the sentiment of it and it seems that the overall sentiment of his lyrics this time around is really confrontational with these issues. He’s shining a light on a lot of issues that other people won’t touch directly, but doing something positive in bringing sunlight into them.”

One song, “Screaming Suicide,” addresses harmful voices in one’s head that can lead to suicidal tendencies. But rather than having the subject succumb to those voices, Hetfield offers a lifeline: “Then a voice appears / Whisper in your ears / “You are good enough” / Throwing down a rope / A lifeline of hope …”

In the song “Lux AEterna,” according to Hammett, Hetfield is “saying that there’s truth and positivity and beauty in the light in all of us, and if you face your darkness you will eventually find light. You just have to hunker down and do the work.”

Fans of the “Enter Sandman” and “Until It Sleeps” hitmakers will recall that the band has done the work — quite publicly, as chronicled by the 2004 documentary “Some Kind Of Monster.” The heavy metal group threatened to split apart at the seams but — after Hetfield went to rehab for alcoholism and Trujillo was hired following the departure of Jason Newsted — they weathered the storm, enjoying even greater popularity on the other side.

“We’ve been doing the work for decades already and it’s something we had to do to be able to deal with day-to-day situations, you know?” said Hammett. “We’re learning to live with the radical acceptance of things you can’t change.”

One of the big creative changes are four co-author credits for Hammett on “72 Seasons,” for the title track, “Crown Of Barbed Wire,” “Chasing Light” and “If Darkness Had a Son.”

He made no such contributions to “Hardwired,” after losing a cellphone full of musical ideas years ago.

“After that happened I just started writing and writing and writing, and building up my reservoir until I was back up to 400 or 500 (ideas).

“I reached that point about three or four years ago, so going into the writing sessions for this album, I just had a ton of music to pick and choose from.”

Although he and Hetfield, both being guitarists, come up with the lion’s share of riffs when in creative mode, the process is surprisingly covert.

“All of it goes into one big pile,” Hammett said. “Then we go into that pile and everything is pretty much anonymous. It’s not like, ‘Oh, hey, here’s my riff and we need to make a song out of it.’

“Instead, the quality of the riff takes priority. The riff becomes the basis of a song and then we take it from there.

“It’s not like there’s a name attached to any of this music. We try to approach it as purely as possible: this is what we have to work with and we’ll shape it as much as we can until it turns into something that begins to take form as Metallica.”

Hammett also complimented Trujillo’s songwriting, as the bassist co-wrote “Screaming Suicide,” “Sleepwalk My Life Away” and “You Must Burn!”

As for Hammett’s wildly tasteful solos as lead guitarist, he thinks it’s best when he pulls them out of thin air.

“In the past, when I think about it too much, it kind of loses the spark and sucks the life out of it,” he said. “My very first initial attempt at creating a solo for a section of a song is usually my best idea.

“For this album, I didn’t work on anything in advance. I showed up, figured out what the keys were, what scales I was going to play in and that was it. It’s honest. It’s spontaneous and it feels like it’s a direct flow from whatever that creative space is from the universe … It’s just a musical energy of pure heart and beauty, bro — that’s what I live for these days.”

Guitar aficionados will appreciate the fact that Gibson Custom Shop is issuing 200 replicas of Hammett’s 1979 Flying V guitar for $14,000 (U.S.) each, and the Metallica axeman couldn’t be more stoked about it.

“I love that Flying V so much,” said Hammett. “That was my first great guitar and I played that guitar on the first five Metallica albums. When I was 18 or 19 years old, I modified and customized a lot of it because that’s what me and my friends did to our guitars, and I’m glad I did that because it makes the guitar really interesting for collectors.

“You’re not just buying a stock Gibson that I owned; a lot of it has my own personal modifications and customizing. Because of that — it’s so personalized to me — I feel that when someone buys that they’re buying my concept of what that Flying V should have been back then.”

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