METALLICA will headline the 10th installment of the Download festival at Donington Park on Saturday, June 9, 2012, with an exclusive U.K. performance of the band's top-selling 1991 LP, "Metallica", a.k.a. "the black album." It will be the eighth time the California metal titans will have played at Donington during their three-decade-long career, having previously performed at both Monsters Of Rock and Download festivals.

Asked why METALLICA decided to do the gig, the band's drummer, Lars Ulrich, told Kerrang! magazine, "The people at Download asked. It wasn't our idea.

"The thing is, although we haven't played at Donington for six years, we have been to the U.K. pretty much every single summer since then."

He added, "So they wanted us to do something different, and that's what they came up with. I quite like the fact that come next summer it'll be the 21st anniversary of the 'black album,' not the 20th."

Asked whether he and his bandmates would have to re-learn the two songs from the record — "Don't Tread On Me" and "The Struggle Within" — that METALLICA has never played live before, Lars said,"Yeah. Although to be honest with you, a song like 'The Struggle Within' is a lot easier to re-learn than 'The Frayed Ends Of Sanity'.

"I don't think it's going to be too difficult for us to figure out these songs."

METALLICA's 1991 self-titled fifth album, commonly known as "the black album," in 2009 surpassed SHANIA TWAIN's 1997 record, "Come On Over", as the best-selling CD of the SoundScan era. To date, the black album has sold 15,717,000 copies in the United States.

Although METALLICA had scored their first radio and video airplay with their previous effort, 1988's "...And Justice For All", the black album was the band's biggest commercial breakthrough, producing five singles and making them into one of the most popular rock bands in the world.