Ola Englund of The Haunted and Feared fame has also built up quite the YouTube following for himself as of late, with close to 800,000 subscribers who eagerly await his weekly takes on what’s happening in the world of metal and aggressive music.
In yesterday’s episode, Ola didn’t exactly hold back his thoughts on the new Metallica jam that dropped earlier in the week, ‘Lux Æterna’. While he didn’t pan it, he definitely drilled home the point that ‘The Four Horsemen’ are no spring chickens in the year of our lord 2022. Per Ola:
“It’s a new Metallica song, the production is great. The song is… okay… It’s a good song, the more I listen to it, the more I enjoyed it, obviously. But it’s a very rockabilly, driving-a-car type of song. You know, to me, it just sounds like Metallica becoming old.
Does that make any sense? They sound old. They have a little bit of a Motorhead and maybe even a Megadeth vibe to the riff right there. But I guess they’re old people now, and it’s old people’s music, that’s okay. It’s still enjoyable to some extent.”
Our first reaction upon watching Ola’s take was to angrily shake our fists at the sky and at our laptop screen. Old people music?? Get the fuck outta here. We’re hip. We’re with it. How dare you insinuate that our genre’s global ambassadors and the music we adore is for old geezers.
But the more we thought about it, the truth is that the guy isn’t technically wrong. Kirk Hammett is 60 years old. Fans (like us) heralded Lux’s thrash-tinged flavor of the ‘Tallica glory days. But Metallica’s true thrash era was in the 1980’s – that’s essentially 40 fucking years ago, friends. Other fans loved the Load-era vibes on Lux. Even that record is pushing 30!
So yeah, as much as it pains us to admit it, maybe we are indeed getting older. Maybe a lot of us are a bit closer to the ‘ol grave than we’d like to admit. Maybe Metallica IS music for old(er) people now.
But as a parting thought, that’s why the whole Stranger Things ‘Master of Puppets’ phenomenon from this summer was so cool and important for pushing our genre forward.
How often does a band that predominately speaks to the older generation get a chance to be introduced to the youth in a way that’s authentically cool? That show single-handedly turned an entire generation of kids on to some of the best metal music ever made. There’s a good chance that, as cheesy as it might sound, the next generation’s Metallica is jamming in a basement somewhere right now specifically because they got turned on to metal from Stranger Things.
So before we give in to the protective gatekeeping instinct that we’re all (us included) guilty of at times, just remember that when our bands and culture are introduced to the mainstream zeitgeist, it helps keep the music alive, innovating, and thriving for generations to come.
Anyways, check out Ola’s maybe not-so-hot take for yourself in the video below:
