Metallica Crack Open the Vault Again: ReLoad Gets the Deluxe Box Set Treatment

Nearly three decades after it landed in record stores with a thud heard around the metal world, ReLoad is getting its day in the sun. Metallica announced on April 28, 2026 that the seventh studio album in their catalog will be reissued in remastered form on June 26, with a deluxe box set so stuffed with material that the band is touting nearly 1,700 minutes of audio across the package. It is the latest installment in an ongoing campaign by the band's own Blackened Recordings to revisit, restore, and recontextualize the deepest corners of the Metallica discography, following the Black Album reissue in 2021 and last year's massive Load box set.

For the converted, this is Christmas in June. For everyone else, it is an invitation to reconsider one of the most argued-about records in the band's history.

ReLoad was originally released on November 18, 1997, the second half of the sprawling sessions that also produced 1996's Load. James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Jason Newsted had cut so much material with producer Bob Rock that a double album was floated and ultimately shelved in favor of two separate releases bookending an enormous touring cycle. ReLoad debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, marking three consecutive chart-toppers for the band after the Black Album and Load, and it ultimately spent close to 80 weeks on the chart on its way to a 4x platinum certification from the RIAA. By any commercial yardstick, ReLoad was a juggernaut. By the yardstick of the Master of Puppets faithful, it was a betrayal in eyeliner and short hair.

Time has been kinder than the message boards of 1997 ever were. Songs like Fuel and The Memory Remains became immovable fixtures of the Metallica live set and remain so on the band's current M72 World Tour. The album's bluesy, Southern-tinged hard rock textures, once dismissed as the sound of a thrash band losing the plot, now read as a confident detour by a group that had been quietly absorbing Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and AC/DC for years. Even Ulrich himself, in a 2013 Revolver interview, made his peace with the era, calling Load and ReLoad records that sit creatively alongside anything else in the catalog, just with bluesier bones and worse haircuts.

The remaster has been handled by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering with longtime Metallica collaborator Greg Fidelman overseeing the project. The album will be available across the full retail spectrum, including standard 180-gram double vinyl, a Wal-Mart exclusive 140-gram color variant, CD, an expanded 3CD edition, cassette, and digital, with a Spatial Audio mix using Dolby Atmos for the headphones-and-couch crowd.

The real prize, as always with these campaigns, is the Limited-Edition Deluxe Box Set, priced at $274.98. The numbered, one-time pressing centers on the remastered ReLoad on 180-gram double vinyl, a 7-inch of The Memory Remains, and Live at Ministry of Sound '97 spread across three 140-gram LPs documenting the band's intimate London club show from that era. The 15 CDs span the remastered album itself plus previously unreleased riff tapes, demos, rough mixes, B-sides, rarities, and a sprawling pile of live recordings. Four DVDs gather behind-the-scenes studio footage, on-air and television appearances, the band's pop-up performance in the parking lot of the CoreStates Complex in Philadelphia, footage from Seoul, and more. Memorabilia includes a pack of 13 Rorschach Test cards, an 11-by-17 Gimme Fuel poster, a Pushead print, a 10-pack of guitar and bass picks, lyric sheets, three laminated tour pass replicas, and a deluxe 128-page book of photos and oral history from the people who lived it.

Pre-orders open today, with instant-grat tracks including the remastered The Memory Remains, an Instrumental Mix, Take 18 Floor Take of the same song, and a Live in Brisbane recording arriving in fans' inboxes immediately. The band has also launched #GetTheReLoadOut, a follow-up to last year's Load-focused fan cover competition, this time expanded to include visual and performance artists alongside musicians. Two grand prize winners will walk away with autographed deluxe box sets.

For an album that was once filed under guilty pleasure or outright apostasy, ReLoad is enjoying quite a second act. The numbered box, the Atmos mix, the unheard riff tapes, the Marianne Faithfull collaboration restored to pristine clarity. Whatever you thought of ReLoad in 1997, Metallica are betting you will think about it again in 2026.