The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

While it is a brilliant return to their roots, the choice of ‘yellow’ as a key colour was met with some negative commentary from ‘brand purists’.

I don’t mean fans, but brand and design folks.

This was amazing for 2 reasons.

The first is our job is to keep things moving evolving rather than continually replicating what’s gone before, so if anyone should be open minded to change, it’s brand and design folk.

[It also highlights my problem with people who keep banging on about ‘brand assets’, because they are confusing recognition with interesting. Or worse, thinking recognition beats being and doing interesting stuff for audiences]

Secondly, the album was designed – as many have been – by the brilliant folk at the wonderful Turner Duckworth … and given their body of work, if anyone knows about designing modern iconography, it’s them.

But overall, I just found the whole debate amusing.

Metallica have always approached albums as a way to express their current frame of creative mind … and given they always look to inject something new or challenging into their work, the choice of yellow seems the perfect way to communicate ‘next chapter’.

In the case of 27 Seasons – also known as the first 18, and arguably, most significant years of your life – James said this …

“There’s been a lot of darkness in my life and in our career and things that have happened with us … but always having a sense of hope, always having the light that is in that darkness, keeps us moving. Without darkness, there’s no light, and being able to focus a little more on the light instead of how it used to be and how horrible it is, that can only be a good thing. There’s a lot of good things going on in life — focusing on that instead helps to balance out my life. And there’s no one meaning to it — everyone has some sense of hope or light in their life, and, obviously, music is mine.“

When you read that, it’s not hard to work out that the use of yellow is part of a bigger idea around the album rather than a desire to build a one colour brand which some have claimed.

Unsurprisingly, they’re the same people who talk about brand assets like you can just buy them off the shelf rather than make them a byproduct of what you do, so that they have value in them that you also keep building.

By pure chance, I was asked by people connected to the band to do a talk to a music publishing company.

While not specifically related to Metallica, I was asked by someone in the audience for my opinion on their ‘new image’ and whether it risked upsetting their core audience.

I had thought this question may came up, which is why I had prepared an answer.

After informing them I had never known a brand – let alone a band – who knew their audience as well as them … and if you listen to the track, I doubt any of their fans would mistake a revitalised Metallica for Ed Sheeran … I said this.

“If Rock n’ Roll is about rebellion, then surely there’s nothing more rock n’ roll than Metallica using yellow rather than the category norm of black?”

It was met with applause.

And some disgust, hahaha.

But here’s the thing …

Brands – and bands – don’t move forward if all they do is give audiences the same thing over and over again. Nor will they if they just give audiences exactly what they want over and over again. Longevity is as much about keeping people on their toes as it is satisfying their passion and curiosity and you only stand a chance of achieving that by following what interests you, not what interests everyone else.

Metallica get this more than most.

It’s part of the reason they have stayed at the top … because by doing things that interest them, they do things that interests more people rather than just the same people.

As I wrote for MTV years ago, brands can learn a lot from bands … because while brands may think finding shortcuts or disguises allows them to optimise their efficiency, everyone else can tell it’s because they’ve run out of ideas or energy.

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