METALLICA's LARS ULRICH: 'St. Anger' Continues To Blow My Head Off

More than half a year after the release of "St. Anger", METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich makes no apologies about the album's raw, underproduced nature, calling it a "powerful" statement that "continues to blow my head off."

"It's been six or eight months now, so I'm realising we made a record that was very, very aggressive and very challenging," Ulrich explained to Australia's The Age. "I can see that now, more than I could in April when we were finishing it, when my main job was protecting it from being watered down by other, uh, pollutants.

"It's a pretty aggressive, fucked-up record and I understand why some people are challenged by it. That actually makes me appreciate it even more. When I put it on, it continues to blow my head off. In terms of a statement, it's a pretty powerful one. I'm really proud of the fact that we had the balls to make a record of 75 minutes of relentless aggression."

In the same interview, Ulrich spoke about the continuing debate in the heavy metal community over whether METALLICA are maverick geniuses or sell-out pussies who have forgot the monochromatic testosterone rule of metal badness.

"I would claim — and I'll try it with a straight face here," Ulrich said, "that that's one thing we've been fighting all these years.

"I hear myself sometimes saying, 'METALLICA's not a heavy metal band' and all this other nonsense, and of course METALLICA is a heavy metal band in a musical (sense). But we always worked hard to fight preconceptions about what heavy metal is.

"What you're supposed to look like, how you're supposed to behave, I always found that stuff way too limiting. I always found it a great contradiction, because if rock 'n' roll is about freedom and escapism and individuality, then isn't there a paradox in the conservative mind-set within the heavy metal world?" Read the rest of the interview here.