Prior to releasing 72 Seasons, Metallica released four songs from the album — “Lux Aeterna,” “Screaming Suicide,” “If Darkness Had a Son” and the title track. But which of the album’s deep cuts do people seem to be enjoying and, well, not enjoying the most?
A user on Reddit posted the Spotify stats for all of the songs on the album, and aside from the four aforementioned songs — which obviously have the most streams because they’ve been out the longest — the song “Shadows Follow” has racked up the most listens since the album came out on April 14, with over 3.6 million spins as of today (April 24). “Room of Mirrors” is the least-streamed of the tracks, having accumulated 1.9 million listens.
“I think by far the biggest factor in this will be album placement,” another Reddit user commented on the post. “Shadows Follow” is the second track on the album, while “Room of Mirrors” is the second-to-last. “Inamorata” is the closing track, but it has more streams. A few other commenters noted that “Room of Mirrors” is their favorite of all 12 songs.
After looking at the Spotify stats, we were curious if there would be a similar pattern for the YouTube videos. Metallica have uploaded many different versions of the individual songs onto their YouTube channel, including lyric videos for each of the tracks in several different languages. For the purpose of comparing the stats, we looked at the official music video for each song.
READ MORE: Watch Metallica Members Break Down ’72 Seasons’ Track-By-Track
Similar to the Spotify data, the videos for the four tracks that were released ahead of the album have the most views on YouTube, but there was a difference when looking at the deep cuts. Whereas “Shadows Follow” had the most streams on Spotify, as mentioned above, “Sleepwalk My Life Away” was actually the video with the most amount of views after the first four. It currently has a total of 1.3 million watches, and “You Must Burn!” had the lowest number of views, coming in at 349,000.
We should note, though, that all of the videos were uploaded on different days. The video for “Sleepwalk My Life Away” was uploaded 10 days ago, and “You Must Burn!” was shared four days ago, so the former had six days of time on the latter.
It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers change, or don’t, over time. Metallica’s 2023 European tour kicks off in a few days in Amsterdam, and then they’ll head back to the U.S. for a massive run starting in August. See all of the dates and get tickets here.
Metallica: A Photo Timeline of Their Remarkable Career
A photo timeline of Metallica’s career.