When we weren’t busy watching sports contests, we listened to some stuff. Here are the best things we heard this year. Metallica, Hardwired… to Self-Destruct I won’t claim that Metallica’s embarrassingly titled Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, was anywhere close to the best album of the year, or even my favorite, but it was 100 percent the album that made me the happiest to realize did not suck. This is the way of things for a Metallica fan these days: Wait ages for an album and pray it’s not humiliating to the band and to the listener, because that’s the impression you’re all stuck with for a long time, not knowing if there’ll be another one. Let me tell you that Hardwired is objectively good. Not “good for a bunch of 50-year-olds,” not “good compared to Lulu,” bu…