Metallica: Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield & Robert Trujillo.
The long wait for another album from Metallica since 2008’s Death Magnetic should be over soon. Yes, they’ve already been in the studio for a while, as we noted last fall. “Everybody’s gotta be patient,” advised bassist Robert Trujillo at the end of last year. “But it’s coming, and that’s the beautiful thing.”
“[T]hankfully we’re quite far along,” drummer Lars Ulrich recently told Rolling Stone. “Hopefully we should be able to knock that on the head this spring, I would guess.” The band say they have 20 songs they’ve been working on with producer Greg Fidelman. The recording has been at a pace that recognizes how they are all now grown-ups with lives outside of music, even if it remains their primary passion. Plus, “Nowadays, we sit and go, ‘That’s a great piece of music,’ and ‘That’s really cool,’ and then we’ll play it faster, then slower, then half a step down, exploring all these options,” he says.
Metallica have remained busy since Death Magnetic. They released a collaboration with the late Lou Reed, Lulu, in 2011, and have toured and performed frequently, most recently playing a Super Bowl pre-show “The Night Before” concert on February 6th at AT&T Park in their hometown of San Francisco.
On Record Store Day, April 16, the band will issue deluxe remastered versions of their first two albums, 1983’s Kill ‘Em All and ’84’s Ride The Lighting, both individually and together as a box set loaded with much bonus material. That same day they also will issue Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Metallica! – Live at Le Bataclan, a nine-song concert recording from their 2003 special appearance at the Paris nightclub attacked by terrorists on November 13th last year. Proceeds from the record will benefit victims of the attack.
The fall will see the publication of Metallica: Back to Front, author Matt Taylor’s book on the band’s breakthrough 1986 Master of Puppets album and the tour that followed. It will be chock full of previously unseen material from the group’s archives alongside material from exclusive interviews with the band members.
“We’ve had one foot in the past, sifting through old photos and old memorabilia and listening to old songs, and another in the new album,” Ulrich says. “It’s been a confluence of all these different energies, and I’m not even sure exactly what to make of all of it.”
So expect an album before the year is out – but don’t hold your breath (quite yet). But there is one thing that is for sure about the band’s 10th release, and it’s what their fans have come to rely on from Metallica. “It’s metal. It’s heavy,” promises guitarist Kirk Hammett.
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