“I like to push some of those buttons. I like the fact that people have a problem with what we’re doing”: How Metallica kicked back against the 1990s haters with Reload

Metallica posing for a photograph in the mid 1990s.

Thanks to a shift in sound and image, Metallica’s mid-90s period was the most divisive era of their career to that point. But in this classic interview from the Metal Hammer archives, originally published on the eve of the release of 1997’s Reload album, we found drummer Lars Ulrich in defiant mood – and ready to push back against the haters.