While many of the top hard rock acts of the last two decades imploded or faded away, Metallica [ tickets ] kept rolling along.

"St. Anger," a feisty return to the aggressive metal Metallica pounded listeners with in the '80s, was released in 2003--despite the departure of 14-year-veteran bassist Jason Newstead, the rehab stint of founding guitarist James Hetfield, and the group therapy that followed his return. Go back a few years, and the band was in the middle of a music file-sharing imbroglio that saw drummer Lars Ulrich vilified by techies and applauded by musicians.

Metallica [ tickets ] currently finds itself readying for its second round of North American tour dates with new bass player Robert Trujillo (Ozzy Osbourne, Suicidal Tendencies, Infectious Grooves), which gets underway in March.

Ulrich spoke with liveDaily at Metallica's headquarters in San Rafael, CA.

liveDaily: "St. Anger" is like "back to the old days," huh? More aggressive raw, pre-"Black Album" music.

Lars Ulrich: When we were playing this record back for people in March or April, one of the things I heard all the time, 'It sounds like the natural successor to 'And Justice For All.' or 'This is the record you should have put out after 'Justice.' [quizzical look] And I'd go, 'No, motherf---er, you don't understand. We had to go all this way around, go here and go there, in order to get back to be comfortable doing it again.' Because if we had done this record after 'Justice,' it would have been bulls---. It wouldn't have been from the heart. It wouldn't have been pure. That's the one thing, you can sit down and take a look at anything that Metallica has done--any of the different journeys we've taken--and you can take all your shots at us. [But] one thing you can't say--and this is what we're most proud of)-- is that we've ever done anything for manipulative reasons. It's never been contrived. The reason this record didn't happen in 1989 or 1990 was because we couldn't deal with it anymore. We had to go somewhere else, musically. Then we had to go somewhere else, then somewhere else, and one day, after 15 years, we stopped running. And then it was like, 'Wow, this is really fun again.'

So much was written about your fights with Bob Rock during the "Black Album" sessions. Now he's family. What's he given to the band over the years?

Bob Rock, what I mostly love about our professional relationship is that he continues to not only challenge us, but challenge himself. He just fits in with our vibe so perfectly because he is not content with the status quo. He's not content with just doing something that he knows works--at least not with this band. I think a lot of people in the early days had this vision of him as being this guy that produced these middle-of-the-road hard rock records that sounded very good for airplay, and all this type of stuff. He obviously did that, but with us it was a perfect fit because he was not only willing to go to unknown places that we wanted to go to, but he was ready to lead us there also. When you've got that kind of relationship, that's a pretty cool thing.

You recruited Robert Trujillo to play bass after Rock recorded bass for the album. Did you have a short list of people to audition for the tour, and why did Trujillo win?

Yeah, we had a short list of four. They were all friends of ours, people we knew, people our age. We didn't want to go rape and pillage, we didn't want to lure somebody away from an existing band situation. I don't mean that disrespectfully to Ozzy's situation. I mean, we didn't want to go get the guy in Disturbed or Staind, somebody that was in an established band. With Rob--and again no disrespect to Ozzy--but Rob was more like a side guy with him. When we finished up the record [with Bob Rock], we realized that we were pretty much over most of the work on the creative side, that's when we started the audition process of bringing in bass players. It was interesting. There weren't any particularly great revelations or anything like that. The biggest revelation was that Rob is just a better bass player than anybody else. [laughs]

After all of the Napster and file-sharing controversies, do you have an opinion about the RIAA crackdown on it?

I was talking to my manager Cliff Bernstein about it yesterday on the phone, something in the New York Times, they were talking about the RIAA because it made some kind of false premonition that Metallica was supportive of the RIAA crackdown. And I sat there and said, 'I've never heard myself voice support for the RIAA on their crackdown. What am I missing here? Should I go on the record and defend it?' He goes, 'No, because people will take what you say and make it whatever they want it to be. You're sort of…f---ed.' So Cliff said, 'Well how do you really feel about it?' And I said, 'Is it possible to not have an opinion?' I actually don't have one. It's like, as you're driving by the scene of an accident, do you have an allegiance to the accident that you're watching unfold in front of your eyes, or are you watching it as a bystander?

And when somebody downloads "Frantic" ...

When somebody downloads a Metallica track, does it bother me? I can't honestly say that it bothers me anymore. I can't get too wound up about it, because it's not something I control.

You've expressed such devotion for legendary metal bands like Black Sabbath and Motorhead--has it registered that in 30 or 40 years, you're going to be viewed in the same light? A lot of younger bands look up to you.

That's a very difficult area to navigate. I would like to think that in its purest form, part of Metallica being whatever the f--- it is, it's because that way of thinking doesn't really show up on the radar. On our radar, anyway. At the same time, of course, I'm not completely stupid--although I'm doing a good job of appearing that way right now. Of course I have an understanding of what Metallica means to a lot of people. It still blows my mind when I sit around all these people, your Sum 41s, Limp Bizkit, or whatever, I feel like their peers. I look at a band like Korn and think, 'These guys are completely on the same level.' They're peers of ours. They're a band I have the deepest amount of respect and love for. And then they're sitting there playing Metallica songs on TV shows and sharing their respect ... that still kind of blows my mind.