Metallica releases "All Nightmare Long" video

Metallica has issued a new nine-minute video for the song "All Nightmare Long" from its latest album, Death Magnetic. The clip, which premiered at Metallica.com, is a weird and creepy mix of animation and what is made to resemble old stock footage. It tells an alternate history story of mutant spores discovered by the Soviet Union and used as a biological weapon to turn U.S. citizens into zombies during the Cold War. The band performed the song itself live for the first time last Friday (December 5th) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Drummer Lars Ulrich told us that because many of the songs on Death Magnetic started life during tour soundchecks, "All Nightmare Long" used to have a very different name: [ Click to listen if you have a backstage pass] "Most of the pieces of music that we would end up jamming on were basically, the way we would refer to them would be by the city they came from. A bunch of the stuff in the song 'All Nightmare Long,' the whole middle section, that was in a song called 'Glasgow,' because it all came from Glasgow (Scotland). And so there's a bunch of that stuff that just literally, it's just directly correlated to geographical places. That was kind of the easiest way to keep track of it."

Other unusual working titles from Death Magnetic: "The Day That Never Comes" was called "Casper, Wyoming," while "Cyanide" was referred to as "Munich."

Frontman James Hetfield told Sun Media that the lyrical content of "All Nightmare Long" was "an attempt to get back to the H.P. Lovecraft mythos" which Hetfield referenced on the band's classic 1986 track "The Thing That Should Not Be."
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