Metallica: How to Watch ‘Black Album’ Era Archival Concerts

Metallica is partnering with Nugs.net for a series of livestreams highlighting concerts from the band’s “Black Album” era.

The series began yesterday (January 8), and concerts will stream every Sunday and Monday through February 6. A list of shows can be viewed below.

In a statement from Nugs.net, “We’re teaming up with The Metallica Black Box to bring back their Black Album archival livestream series! Streaming for free and exclusively for Nugs.net subscribers, we’ll be airing ten rare, Wherever We May Roam tour performances from 1991-1993. All content has been digitally transferred, and audio has been mastered, but the standard definition charm remains. A true snapshot of the time.”

Complete details on the series can be found at Nugs.net.

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In other Metallica news: 2023 is going to be a major year for the metal icons. The band shared a new song, “Lux Æterna,” in late November. The track is the lead single off the band’s new studio album 72 Seasons, which comes out on April 14.

In a statement on the album’s title, James Hetfield said, “72 seasons. The first 18 years of our lives that form our true or false selves. The concept that we were told ‘who we are’ by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are. I think the most interesting part of this is the continued study of those core beliefs and how it affects our perception of the world today. Much of our adult experience is reenactment or reaction to these childhood experiences. Prisoners of childhood or breaking free of those bondages we carry.

72 Seasons is available for pre-save here, while physical copies are available for pre-order at Metallica.com.

‘Metallica’ & The 9 Other Best-Selling Albums During the SoundScan Era

Metallica released their self-titled fifth studio album on August 12, 1991. Affectionately known as “The Black Album,” the LP became a game-changer for the band. It also had a massive impact on the music industry at large thanks to the game-changing technology then known as SoundScan, which premiered on March 1, 1991.

Per a feature piece from Billboard, “SoundScan, which is now known as MRC Data, measured album sales as they happened — stores scanned bar codes at the checkout register — and over the next few months [after its launch] it upended the conventional music business wisdom about what sold, as well as when and how. It revealed the popularity of several genres — alternative rock, country, hip-hop, harder metal — that had been seen as commercially marginal compared to bread-and-butter pop-rock bands.”

Basically, SoundScan provided real-time data of what was actually selling at record stores and other retailers, and it has provided proof of Metallica’s popularity.

How popular are the metal icons? “The Black Album” is the biggest selling record in the United States since the launch of SoundScan.

Metallica, however, has some very unique company on the list of the biggest selling albums of the SoundScan era. Scroll through the gallery below to see which titles join them in the top ten.