Metallica will headline the first-ever Download Germany

Metallica have been announced as headliners of the first-ever Download Germany, scheduled for June 24, 2022 at Hockenheimring racing circuit near Frankfurt.

Also announced are war-obsessed Swedish power metallers and flak jacket-enthusiasts Sabaton, and U.S. sluggers Five Finger Death Punch.

Tickets go on sale on Friday, September 17, priced at €139.

Metallica recently appeared at a special event to mark the release of the massive, 30th birthday edition of their breakthrough Black Album. During the show, hosted by U.S. DJ Howard Stern, the band performed Nothing Else Matters with Miley Cyrus. At one point, when Elton John – with whom Miley Collaborated on a recording of the song for the 53-track Blacklist covers album – described the ballad as “one of the best songs ever written,” James Hetfield appeared to visibly well up. Aww.

Talking to Kerrang! about the album, then-bassist Jason Newsted explained how the song helped boost the band over the next wall and become one of the biggest artists on the planet.

“So that soft song blows down all the walls for Battery and Fight Fire With Fire to get through and penetrate up to those people,” he says. ​“Without the soft song, could it have happened? Without the soft song, would we be talking about the relevance of all this now? Without the soft song would we have been able to take the ​‘RAARGH!’ to the world in the way that we did?”

In the wake of the album’s success, guitarist Kirk Hammett told us Kirk Hammett how it felt when Metallica were put into a ​“different league” in which they were​“doing numbers like Guns N’ Roses and U2”.

“It felt really strange,” he told us. ​“It was great, in that we were flying the flag for heavy metal, we were bringing our type of music to a lot of people that had not heard it all around the globe. But at the same time, a lot of our core underground fans, they thought they were losing us. And I can understand that. When a band goes from selling a million albums to all of a sudden selling 12 million albums, the feeling of intimacy with that band starts to erode.”

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