Dates on the M72 tour, which run via September 2024, are organized round “no repeat weekends,” that includes two exhibits in every metropolis with two totally different lists and two totally different units of opening acts. (The band will play two weekends in Mexico Metropolis, the place the tour wraps up.) The stage is doughnut formed, with followers standing inside and outside; the setup permits band members to face totally different elements of the group at totally different occasions, and it depends on 4 drum setups, creating a number of entrance rows.

“Mixing it up” with the set listing itself is a surprisingly complicated affair. Metallica productions go large, and the band’s elaborate program of pyrotechnics, lighting and interstitial audio-video, amongst different prospers — the New Jersey present included a drop of dozens of large black-and-yellow seashore balls — has traditionally discouraged main modifications to the listing. Having 4 drum kits this time didn’t simplify issues.

Ultimately, the band developed what Ulrich referred to as a “slot” system based mostly on the band’s totally different “meals teams” of songs, a reference to their really feel and tempo. Slot 1 (of 16) on the M72 tour, for instance, will at all times be an upper-mid-tempo fan favourite — Day 1 at MetLife, it was “Creeping Dying” — that has a shortly recognizable opening riff: not too quick or sophisticated. However the songs in that slot will rotate. Slot 10 ought to at all times be a ballad, like “Nothing Else Issues.” The nearer is at all times “Grasp of Puppets” or “Enter Sandman.”

Ulrich additionally retains cautious knowledge about what tune the band has performed the place, and tries to tailor the set listing accordingly.

“At occasions it turns right into a science” he stated. “We’re in Montreal now, and I’ll have all the information for the final 20 years that we’ve performed Montreal in entrance of me. And I can put a set listing collectively the place the deeper cuts is not going to be repeated.”

Sure songs, like “Sandman,” “Puppets” and “One,” are in fixed rotation. Ulrich stated the band calls them the “toe-tapping favorites” — an odd, and maybe ironic, alternative of phrases for songs higher recognized for headbanging.

Numerous bands start to mellow as they mature; by most accounts, that occurred to Metallica over three a long time in the past, sufficient time for the band to have since come full circle. Just like the band’s two most up-to-date albums, “72 Seasons” continues Metallica’s return to the thrash-metal fashion that outlined its early years, and the tour supporting it has to date adopted swimsuit: mild on covers and ballads, heavy on the heavy. New shredders like “72 Seasons” and “Lux Aeterna” slot tightly into lists full of thrash classics like “Search & Destroy” (1983), “Battery” (1986) and “Blackened” (1988).

Ulrich spoke intimately in regards to the set listing from that first evening at MetLife and helped decipher among the notes. These are edited excerpts from the dialog.