I like the new song, but considering how I'm not going insane over it I've realized something that well, it's really nothing new to me but I understood it clearly now...
I still consider myself a Metallica fan, but simply put, the fire and the passion is no longer there for me, towards them. They were one of the first metal bands I listened to, 20 years ago, and so they shaped a lot my defition of what heavy metal was supposed to me. Have a laugh with this naive opinion, with my musical tastes still developing as a young kid, I considered Creeping Death the "heaviest and most brutal song ever made", I couldn't imagine something even heavier and faster, haha!
Anyway, I fell in love like any metalhead with the stuff up until the Black Album, and the first album that I was anticipating as a fan was Load. Regardless of how the album aged and how it has been revaluated over time, c'mon, let's admit it, we all hated it back in 1996 when it came out. Plus there was the Napster thing, the sudden change of look and style, ReLoad filled with bad songs only a year after etc... basically Metallica were not so cool anymore.
Garage INC was all covers, and the orchestra album was just a side thing, it took them 6 years after ReLoad to come up with a new album... and it was St. Anger. Ugh.
By the time the shock of that atrocity has passed, another 5 years have gone. It was 2008 and Death Magnetic came... too little, too late.
I saw them live for the first and so far only time in 2011, with the Big 4 tour: it was awesome! I truly and really liked it, awesome setlist (with only ONE song post Black album, go figure...), and I really felt drawn to their music again.
And then, well, they disappeared AGAIN only to resurface in these days.
To put it short, Metallica took an hell of a time to release albums, and with various degrees of letdown. Too little over too much time to resparkle the initial fire of when I discovered them, I still love dearly the first part of their carrer but with them it's not a matter of staying a fan - it's a matter of seeing every 5 years or more if the new stuff doesn't suck or not.
So while I will surely listen with interest to the new album, I guess they'll never really "bring me back" for good, they're gonna disappear until 2022 anyway.