It’s not like Metallica have been sitting still since the release of Death Magnetic back in 2008. Not only have they toured extensively, but they’ve also produced their own festival for the last few years, bought back their masters and started their own record label, and even come out with their own movie. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s been six years since they came out with a full-length album. In September of 2008, George W. Bush was still president, and Spotify hadn’t even launched yet. The band seem to have gotten the message, as they’ve just told Billboard that they’ll be starting work on the follow-up to Death Magnetic “in a few weeks.” Kirk Hammett tells the magazine:
When we start, that’s going to be our main priority, and we’re pretty excited about it because we’ve been saying we need to start working on this album, but we’ve been procrastinating greatly with it. We’ve pretty much come up with every sort of excuse we can not to start work on the album, but we’ve run out of excuses, so we pretty much have to start work on it now.
The reason the band has been taking their time isn’t lack of ideas, apparently it’s too many. Hammett says that James Hetfield has 800 ideas, while he has 400. So apparently it’ll take some time to winnow those 1,200 song ideas down to an album’s worth of songs. Even if they only use an eighth of those ideas, it’ll result in an album that’ll make …And Justice For All seem like Reload. The new Metallica album will have to wait, however, until the immediate stuff on the band’s radar, namely, Hammett’s Fear FestEvil taking place early next month and their appearance on the Grammys on January 26th.
