Metallica embarked on the M72 World Tour earlier this year, and their recent concerts were full of surprises. They kept the fans guessing after significantly tweaking their setlist, and the bassist Robert Trujillo recently revealed why they decided to go down this road.
Metallica’s latest tour saw them perform two dates with completely different setlists in almost every city, and that wasn’t a coincidence. Trujillo recently revealed they noticed that the opening minutes of their concerts weren’t impactfully enough, so they needed to introduce a few tweaks to the setlist.
“Initially, we thought it would be really clever and exciting to open the show with an instrumental… We found that an instrumental is very powerful for the set but it sits much better in the middle of a set, it’s a chance for the fan to absorb and embrace the song,” Trujillo told Classic Rock.
They opted to open the shows with instrumentals such as “Orion” and “The Call of Ktulu” before moving on to more electrifying songs because they didn’t want to come out with “something that kind of smacks you in the face”, according to Trujillo.
This strategy certainly worked, and they’ll get to chance to experiment with the setlist again once they go back to touring this spring.
