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A Virtual Metallica Tour Is Coming To SiriusXM In May

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A Virtual Metallica Tour Is Coming To SiriusXM In May

The 30-date tour will compromise one archival concert a day from all over the world

GRAMMYs/Apr 30, 2020 - 12:31 am

Metallica has announced that SiriusXM will launch a Mandatory Metallica channel in May that will feature a virtual tour of past performances.

Mandatory Metallica will broadcast the "biggest songs, rarities, and the 'Virtual Metallica Tour,'" the metal band Tweeted on Wednesday, April 29. The channel will launch Friday, May 1, and will be free until Saturday, May 30. 

The 30-date tour will be compromised of an archival concert a day from all over the world. Performances will include a 2013 concert at New York’s Apollo Theater and a 2016 show at New York’s Webster Hall, the band said on FacebookLars Ulrich will also stream "Welcome Home" DJ sets on the channel. In addition, the band will do "Metallica Mondays" takeovers on SiriusXM's Liquid Metal channel every Monday in May.

Metallica has also been releasing past performances via Facebook, including a November 1991 performance in Muskegon, Mich. 

Stream Metallica's channel here

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The GRAMMY Channel Returns To SiriusXM For The 2024 GRAMMYs
The GRAMMY Channel is airing now on SiriusXM channel 107 and on the new SiriusXM app through Feb. 7

Graphic Courtesy of The Recording Academy

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The GRAMMY Channel Returns To SiriusXM For The 2024 GRAMMYs

Now airing on SiriusXM channel 107 and on the new SiriusXM app through Feb. 7, the channel celebrates the artists, albums and songs nominated at the 2024 GRAMMYs, including music from Billie Eilish, Coco Jones, Jelly Roll, SZA, Taylor Swift, and more.

GRAMMYs/Jan 25, 2024 - 10:53 pm

The 2024 GRAMMYs are just a week away, and the anticipation is building to a fever pitch. Now, SiriusXM, the Official US Radio Partner of the GRAMMY Awards, is providing your soundtrack to Music's Biggest Night with the return of The GRAMMY Channel for its fourth year.

Now airing on SiriusXM channel 107 and on the new SiriusXM app through Feb. 7, the pop-up channel will feature a variety of music from the artists, albums and songs currently nominated at the 2024 GRAMMYs, including Billie Eilish, Doja Cat, Foo Fighters, Jelly Roll, Jon Batiste, Miley Cyrus, Olivia Rodrigo, SZA, Taylor Swift, and more. It all leads up to SiriusXM's live red carpet broadcast from the 2024 GRAMMYs on Sunday, Feb. 4.

The GRAMMY Channel offers the quintessential GRAMMY soundtrack with music, stories and insights from the nominees across multiple Categories, including the Lifetime Achievement Award honorees. Fans will also get to relish the excitement on the red carpet with live coverage and interviews throughout GRAMMY Sunday.

2024 GRAMMYs: Explore More & Meet The Nominees

The channel will also spotlight Best New Artist nominees like Coco Jones, who was the inaugural artist for SiriusXM and Pandora's Artist Accelerator Program, which puts a spotlight on emerging artists and aims to remove barriers created by today's song-first-driven culture to help artists grow their listener base and build fandom. SiriusXM was the first radio outlet to support Jones' single, "I.C.U.," from her debut EP What I Didn't Tell You, playing it in accelerated rotation beginning October 2022 on SiriusXM's The Heat and Heart & Soul. The Heat has also named Jones a "Future Fire" artist, while Heart & Soul has named the song a "Platinum Pick." Aligning with SiriusXM, Pandora had advanced support of the song across its platform, including exclusive content via Takeover modes running on Women in R&B and Platinum.

Eligible customers can get their first three months of SiriusXM streaming for free. Sign up here, and get ready for Music's Biggest Night with The GRAMMY Channel.

Hosted by Trevor Noah, the 2024 GRAMMYs will be broadcast live from Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles Sunday, Feb. 4, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on the CBS Television Network and will be available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+.^ Prior to the Telecast, catch the 2024 GRAMMY Awards Premiere Ceremony, which will stream live on Sunday, Feb. 4, at 3:30 p.m. ET/12:30 p.m. PT on live.GRAMMY.com and on the Recording Academy's YouTube channel.

2024 GRAMMY Nominations: See The Full Nominees List

GRAMMY Rewind: Kendrick Lamar Honors Hip-Hop's Greats While Accepting Best Rap Album GRAMMY For 'To Pimp a Butterfly' In 2016
Kendrick Lamar

Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

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GRAMMY Rewind: Kendrick Lamar Honors Hip-Hop's Greats While Accepting Best Rap Album GRAMMY For 'To Pimp a Butterfly' In 2016

Upon winning the GRAMMY for Best Rap Album for 'To Pimp a Butterfly,' Kendrick Lamar thanked those that helped him get to the stage, and the artists that blazed the trail for him.

GRAMMYs/Oct 13, 2023 - 06:01 pm

Updated Friday Oct. 13, 2023 to include info about Kendrick Lamar's most recent GRAMMY wins, as of the 2023 GRAMMYs.

A GRAMMY veteran these days, Kendrick Lamar has won 17 GRAMMYs and has received 47 GRAMMY nominations overall. A sizable chunk of his trophies came from the 58th annual GRAMMY Awards in 2016, when he walked away with five — including his first-ever win in the Best Rap Album category.

This installment of GRAMMY Rewind turns back the clock to 2016, revisiting Lamar's acceptance speech upon winning Best Rap Album for To Pimp A Butterfly. Though Lamar was alone on stage, he made it clear that he wouldn't be at the top of his game without the help of a broad support system. 

"First off, all glory to God, that's for sure," he said, kicking off a speech that went on to thank his parents, who he described as his "those who gave me the responsibility of knowing, of accepting the good with the bad."

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He also extended his love and gratitude to his fiancée, Whitney Alford, and shouted out his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates. Lamar specifically praised Top Dawg's CEO, Anthony Tiffith, for finding and developing raw talent that might not otherwise get the chance to pursue their musical dreams.

"We'd never forget that: Taking these kids out of the projects, out of Compton, and putting them right here on this stage, to be the best that they can be," Lamar — a Compton native himself — continued, leading into an impassioned conclusion spotlighting some of the cornerstone rap albums that came before To Pimp a Butterfly.

"Hip-hop. Ice Cube. This is for hip-hop," he said. "This is for Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle. This is for Illmatic, this is for Nas. We will live forever. Believe that."

To Pimp a Butterfly singles "Alright" and "These Walls" earned Lamar three more GRAMMYs that night, the former winning Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song and the latter taking Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (the song features Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat). He also won Best Music Video for the remix of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood." 

Lamar has since won Best Rap Album two more times, taking home the golden gramophone in 2018 for his blockbuster LP DAMN., and in 2023 for his bold fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

Watch Lamar's full acceptance speech above, and check back at GRAMMY.com every Friday for more GRAMMY Rewind episodes. 

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5 Revealing Facts About Metallica's 'St. Anger': 20 Years On, The Controversial Album Sounds Better Than You Think
(L-R) James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett of Metallica performing in 2003

Photo: Brian Rasic/Getty Images

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5 Revealing Facts About Metallica's 'St. Anger': 20 Years On, The Controversial Album Sounds Better Than You Think

Get beyond the snark about the snare sound and the lack of guitar solos, and 'St. Anger' sounds like a refreshing mid-career reset for the heavy metal lifers.

GRAMMYs/Jun 5, 2023 - 06:43 pm

Since its release in 2003, there's been a consistent (pingy) drumbeat of chatter about Metallica's St. Anger.

The quixotic snare sound — which bassist and producer Bob Rock claimed he spent about 15 minutes crafting — is central to the St. Anger discourse; a Google search for "metallica st. anger snare" yields about 661,000 results. As for why the eight-time GRAMMY winners uncharacteristically nixed guitar solos? That question yields millions of hits.

Then there's the 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster, one of the most uncomfortably revealing portraits of a rock band engulfed in a mid-life crisis. Memorable moments abound, but for one scene alone — drummer Lars Ulrich's Middle Earth-looking dad hearing a take, and telling his son to "delete that" — the film is a must-watch.

Given the controversial status St. Anger has accrued, it may seem like the metal community may want to, well, delete it. While your mileage may vary, this hotly debated album shouldn't be consigned to any internet-snark dustbin.

Listening with the benefit of temporal distance, tracks like "Frantic," "Some Kind of Monster" and "The Unnamed Feeling" sound raw and alive — perhaps of their time, given its adjacency to then-ascendant nü metal. Ultimately, they conjure the sensation of a reset, rather than a capitulation to trends. 

Today, St. Anger seems to hew less to the reputation it's engineered, and more to Rock's characterization of the thing: "To me, this album sounds like four guys in a garage getting together and writing rock songs. There was really no time to get amazing performances out of James. We liked the raw performances… we just did it, boom, and that was it."

To mark the 20th anniversary of St. Anger, here are five facts about the album.

Metallica Started The Album In An Old Army Barracks

By 2001, Metallica hadn't released an album of original material in almost five years, since 1997's Reload (a follow-up to the previous year's Load). 

While these sessions ground to a halt due to personal upheaval and frontman James Hetfield heading to rehab — and the band later continued work at a new studio in San Rafael, California — this no-nonsense setting befitted the unvarnished quality of the music.

Bassist Jason Newsted Left The Band Early On

Newsted was the second bassist for Metallica, after the tragic 1986 death of Cliff Burton. Newsted's departure came the month they began St. Anger, which destabilized progress on the album.

"Due to private and personal reasons, and the physical damage that I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love, I must step away from the band," Newsted said in a statement. "This is the most difficult decision of my life, made in the best interest of my family, myself, and the continued growth of Metallica."

St. Anger Represented Intense Catharsis For James Hetfield

As Hetfield put it, St. Anger was a valve for which to release intense psychological pressure.

"There's a lot of passion in this. There's two years of condensed emotion in this," he told Metal Edge magazine at the time. "We've gone through a lot of personal changes, struggles, epiphanies, it's deep. It's so deep lyrically and musically… It's so hard to talk about, you really need to hear it."

Accordingly, St. Anger is nothing if not visceral — and two decades haven't sanded off those sharp edges.

As St. Anger's Recording Wound Down, Robert Trujillo Joined On Bass

While producer Bob Rock recorded the bass parts on St. Anger, his instrumental involvement 

would prove to be transitional; Robert Trujillo joined Metallica on bass in February 2001. 

Having played on all ensuing Metallica albums, 2008's Death Magnetic, 2016's Hardwired… to Self Destruct and 2023's 72 Seasons — all of which were warmly received by critics — Trujillo is now the longest-serving bassist in Metallica.

Critics Were Polarized, Then As With Now

While some contemporaneous critics knocked St. Anger as everything from "an ungodly mess" to having "underwent more processing than cat food," not everyone characterized it that way. 

Allmusic called it a "punishing, unflinching document of internal struggle"; Rolling Stone said "there's an authenticity to St. Anger's fury that none of the band's rap-metal followers can touch."

As for the band themselves, they've seemingly come to accept St. Anger, warts and all. 

"There are things I would like to change on some of the records, but it gives them so much character that you can't change them," Hetfield said in 2017. "St. Anger could use a little less tin snare drum, but those things are what make those records part of our history."

Unflinching, daring and unpolished, St. Anger is one of the ultimate "line in the sand" albums in heavy music history. Whatever your perception of this ugly-duckling entry is, take its 20-year anniversary as an opportunity to revisit its fury with fresh ears.

How Many GRAMMYs Have Metallica Won? Ahead Of New Album '72 Seasons': 6 Questions Answered

How Many GRAMMYs Have Metallica Won? Ahead Of New Album '72 Seasons': 6 Questions Answered
Metallica (L-R): Robert Trujillo, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett

Photo: Tim Saccenti

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How Many GRAMMYs Have Metallica Won? Ahead Of New Album '72 Seasons': 6 Questions Answered

On their new album, '72 Seasons,' Metallica take inventory of their past while forging ahead into the future. Here are answers to six questions about the eight-time GRAMMY-winning band.

GRAMMYs/Apr 13, 2023 - 06:23 pm

On their new album, 72 Seasons, Metallica circle the wagons and consolidate all the elements that make them… well, Metallica. Which, granted, many bands tend to do when they cross the four-decade mark. But for these eight-time GRAMMY winners, it's entirely a new look.

"There was this strange thing for many years in our band," drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich told The New York Times in 2016. "We were in such a hurry to move forward, and in such a hurry to move away from certain perceptions about us, that we kept chasing something that we didn't really need to chase."

Much like its predecessors, 2008's Death Magnetic and 2016's Hardwired… To Self Destruct, 72 Seasons eschews any detours they've taken in the past. The songs sprawl; guitar solos are firmly back; there are no NWOBHM covers or symphonic collaborations. The title is backward-looking in a different way — a reference to the years between birth and age 18. And the ouroboros nature of 72 Seasons applies to the lyrics, too.

"Full speed or nothin'," founding vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield barks in lead single "Lux Æterna," a direct quote of "Motorbreath" from their 1983 debut album, Kill 'Em All. In "Room or Mirrors," he quotes "broken, beat and scarred" from Death Magnetic. Those 42 years together — approximately 168 seasons? — are clearly on these four men's minds.

With 72 Seasons tantalizingly close to release, take a look back, just as Metallica do on record — and find answers to six key facts about the world-dominating thrash titans.

Who Used To Be In Metallica?

While Metallica has maintained its current lineup since 2003 — Hetfield, Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo — the band has some famous former members.

The spirit of their early bassist, Cliff Burton, hangs heavy in the rearview; he died in a touring van accident in 1986, right as they hit a zenith with 1986's Master of Puppets.

In a spat that honestly deserves its own article, Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine was the original lead guitarist of Metallica; he's credited as a songwriter on a handful of songs on Kill 'Em All and their celebrated second album, 1984's Ride the Lightning.

Other past members include their original bassist, Ron McGovney, and mid-period bassist, Jason Newsted, who left the band in 2001 to focus on his band Echobrain.

How Many Albums Has Metallica Sold?

Metallica have sold more than 125 million albums worldwide — 67 million of those stateside.

At press time, their best-selling album is 1991's Metallica, or The Black Album — the one with indelible hits from "Enter Sandman" to "Nothing Else Matters" — with a whopping 17 million sales.

How Many GRAMMYs Has Metallica Won?

As of 2023, Metallica have won eight GRAMMYs and been nominated for 18.

In order, those eight wins were for… 

  • Best Rock Performance ("One")

  • Best Metal Performance ("Stone Cold Crazy")

  • Best Rock Performance (Metallica)

  • Best Metal Performance ("Better Than You")

  • Best Hard Rock Performance ("Whiskey in the Jar")

  • Best Rock Instrumental Performance ("The Call Of Ktulu")

  • Best Metal Performance ("St. Anger"),

  • Best Metal Performance ("My Apocalypse")


Check out Metallica's complete GRAMMY stats here!

What Is Metallica's Biggest Song?

By the standard of the Billboard Hot 100, Metallica's most successful song was "Until It Sleeps" from their 1996 album Load — their sole top 10 hit, which peaked at No. 10 and remained on the chart for 20 weeks.

(As per the Billboard 200, their most successful album is The Black Album, which peaked at No. 1, hung there for four weeks, and spent an incredible 706 weeks on the chart.)

Song-wise, though, a look at more granular Billboard categories provides a clearer picture. 

"Master of Puppets" is their biggest track in the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart; it peaked at No. 5. It's also their most successful song in the Rock Digital Song Sales chart, at No. 2; Hot Rock Songs chart, also at No. 2; Hard Rock Digital Song Sales chart, Hard Rock Streaming Songs, and Hot Hard Rock Songs, all at No. 1; and Rock Streaming Songs chart, at No. 3.

As per the Rock & Alternative Airplay chart, "Lux Æterna" leads the pack, with a peak position of No. 2. And while one can go much deeper into the Billboard archives for further information — and factor in non-stateside success — it's clear "Master of Puppets" comes out on top.

Does Metallica Have A New Album?

They certainly do. As stated, 72 Seasons will be released April 14 via Blackened Recordings. It was teased via four singles: "Lux Æterna," "Screaming Suicide," "If Darkness Had a Son," and the title track.

Early reviews are strong: Rolling Stone called it "some of the deepest, hardest-hitting music of their career." Opined Consequence: "It's the sound of a band having fun, laying into a ton of riffs and embracing its own legacy as metal masters."

When Is Metallica Going On Tour?

Metallica will embark on the M72 world tour starting in late April. The trek, which stretches in 2024, will bring the foursome across Europe and North America. 

Check here for their complete tour dates, and be sure to take a dive into 72 Seasons — the perfect impetus to consider the metal heroes' past, present and exceedingly bright future.

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