According to bassist Robert Trujillo, Metallica’s next full-length album could arrive “a lot sooner” than 2008’s Death Magnetic and 2016’s Hardwired…to Self-Destruct. To celebrate the group’s upcoming “Down Under” tour in Australia/New Zealand, Trujillo appeared on this week’s The Music podcast to discuss the fall trek and more.
During the discussion, Trujillo revealed the group has already started “jamming” on new material during their WorldWired tour.
The bassist explained:
“We have a zone we call ‘The Tuning Room’ which is a space where we can jam and warm up before the show. We’re always in there coming up with ideas and you may get a few seconds of an idea but everything is recorded, always. And then of course at home, everyone has got ideas. Death Magnetic was, for the most part, a collaborative effort. Hardwired was more central to James’s specific ideas and was also taking the spirit of what we had done on the previous record. I’m excited about the next record because I believe it will also be a culmination of the two records and another journey. There’s no shortage of original ideas, that’s the beauty of being in this band.”
Later, Trujillo gave a rough estimate on the new album’s release date:
“It will come a lot sooner than the previous two did… this time around I think we’ll be able to jump on it a lot quicker and jump in the studio and start working. We’ve all vowed to get this one going sooner than later. Now, how soon? I don’t know. We’ve been touring non-stop. It’s been over two years now. At some point, sure, we’ll need to take a little bit of a break. It’s sort of the right thing for us to do because we’ve been going so hard.”
Fans waited five years for Metallica to release 2008’s Death Magenetic, which was a follow-up to 2003’s St.Anger. It took the band eight years to release 2016’s Hardwired…to Self-Destruct. With that said, we can guess the album should be released in late 2020 but, could end up arriving sometime in 2021.
