From Metal to Vinyl: Metallica Tours Pressing Plant It Recently Bought

Metallica, masters of the heavy metal, have turned their talents to the medium of vinyl with their purchase of Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA.

Investing in the record-making company in 2023, all four band members toured the facility in July and made custom copies of their 1984 album, Ride the Lightning, in a blue-white-black splatter pattern. The field trip is chronicled in the video below.

The vinyl renaissance

Vinyl records, which have increased in popularity among audiophiles and collectors in recent years, are made of polyvinyl chloride pellets. These pellets are put into the hopper on the record press, then melted and squeezed into a hockey puck-shaped “biscuit.” Stampers are loaded above and below the biscuit to produce each side of the record. When pressed together, the stampers create the grooves in the vinyl.

Many special color effects can be achieved, from simple transparent or opaque single colors to hand-poured blends and color-in-color patterns.

Just a small sample of splatter effects available at Furnace. Image courtesy of Furnace Record Pressing.

An elegant plastic compound

In fact, the term “vinyl” doesn’t quite capture the intricacy of the material used to make records, explained Mark Reiter, vice president of manufacturing operations for Furnace.

“It is a very elegant plastic compound,” Reiter said. “It has waxes, lubricants — a lot of those things get activated at certain temperature points. So, it’s a really sophisticated compound.”

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After all four band members pressed a copy of the record, they put the still-warm platters in trimmers to remove the extra material squeezed out from between the stampers. One copy was handed to a quality control expert.

“People say, ‘I want this job — they’re listening to music all day long,’ ” Reiter told WTOP News. “No, they’re listening for surface defects, they’re making sure that we don’t make a Taylor Swift record that has “Ride the Lightning” on the B-side.”

According to WTOP News, which reported on the band’s tour of the factory, Furnace has pressed more than five million pieces of Metallica vinyl since 2014. Furnace has been in business since 1996.