This year marks one of the biggest year's in Metallica's career. With a highly-anticipated new album on the way and plenty of special appearances, the buzz around the thrash titans is positively electric. On top of all that,  2016 marks the 30th anniversary of Master of Puppets. The new book, Metallica: Back to the Front peers into everything behind the landmark album, and drummer Lars Ulrich has just given us the biggest look into it yet.

In the video above, Ulrich humorously makes his way through the book, noting it's weight is sufficient enough to get in a good workout before cracking the spine and learning "everything that happened every day for that whole year, or however long it was." He quips you can even find out "what we had for breakfast in Oklahoma City on April 23, 1986."

Metallica: Back to the Front features photos of original art and lyrical ideas, rare pictures (including one of the band in their bath robes and bare feet where you can see "eight Metallica tootsies"), interviews with every member of the band along with producer Flemming Rasmussen as well as fans. An exhaustive collection, it isn't quite the 9,000 pages Lars said it was (it's actually 276 pages), but he might be right when he said it would take years to read!

The book is set for release on Sept. 13 of this year and a special Collector's Edition will arrive two week earlier on Aug. 30 through both Metallica's website and Moonrise Media. The Collector's Edition will arrive in a display box with a piece of a road case used on the Master of Puppets tour.

After months of teasing and long-term projections, Metallica are bringing the timetable for the release of their new record into sharper focus. While one source reported the album will be out Oct. 14, the closest the band has come to confirming the date was when Ulrich told Metal Forces, "If the record doesn’t come out this year then it won’t be because it’s not done. It will be because there’s some sort of cosmic reason that it would be smarter to hold onto it until next year. But the record will be done this summer”.

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