Rolling Stone: Metallica Deliver Some of the Deepest, Hardest-Hitting Music of Their Career on ’72 Seasons’
Yellow and black are the colors of caution signs, fallout shelters, and “Baby on Board” placards — warnings of imminent menace and catastrophe if you don’t get your shit together. So it’s fitting that Metallica would adopt the color scheme for the cover of 72 Seasons, their meditation of sorts on the cruelty of youth and the dangers of growing up. Those subjects are nothing new to them (see “The Unforgiven,” “Dyers Eve”), but now that frontman James Hetfield and his bandmates hover around age 60, they’re seeing their journey to adulthood differently.
