In a race to find the lost unlikely collaboration this takes some beating.

The king of monotone, monochromatic New York cool Lou Reed has teamed up with the world’s best selling metal band to make an album. With ten songs written by Lou now ‘Loud’ Reed and arranged and played by Metallica and recorded at the metal bands San Francisco studio it’s a bizarre combination.

Will this make metal hip with the posh media and mercury music types who constantly ignore it whilst debating hip indie bands?

“A marriage made in heaven” claimed Lou Reed. “I knew it from the first day we played together: ‘Oh, man, this is perfection, right in front of me.’ “”Â¨

“I don’t think we’ve ever felt this free,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich says, sitting next to Reed on a couch. “There’s nothing that’s totally outside of the boundary for us, nothing that feels like ‘Oh, what happens if we go there?’ The strength of us” ”â he gestures at Reed ”â “is it feels like we cannot land on a wrong place.””Â¨

“They’re bringing Metallica, with all that power,” Reed confirms. “And because they’re pretty sophisticated, wherever I go, they’re still with me.””Â¨

Reed and Metallica first played together in October 2009, at the 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concerts in New York. Ulrich, singer-guitarist James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo backed Reed on two of his classic songs. “We knew from then,” Reed says, “that we were made for each other.”