Lars Ulrich on Metallica’s Next Album: ‘We’re One Day Closer’

All joking aside, the guitarist says the band hasn’t “really started” working on the follow-up to 2008’s Death Magnetic, but they’re on the way. “We’ve jammed on certain bits and pieces of music and figured out this piece of music works, this works, this doesn’t,” Hammett says. “But we’re still going through that process. James [Hetfield] has 800 pieces of music. I have 400 pieces of music. Once we figure out what pieces of music are actually gonna work for us, then we’re going to start turning those pieces of music into songs and seeing where that leads us.”

“What I can say is, we’re one day closer to the next record being released than we were yesterday,” drummer Lars Ulrich adds. “Unless there’s what’s called an ‘Act of God,’ I would hedge my bets that ‘201’ would be the first three digits in the release year. And I don’t know much beyond that. We’ve been jamming along. We’ve been putting in some time.”

Hammett says he has no idea just how the album will sound like as a whole at this point and that it usually takes Metallica four or five songs to figure out the sonic direction.

The good news for Metallica fans, though, is that the band will be premiering a brand new tune on their upcoming tour, which will kick off a series of shows they’ve dubbed “Metallica by Request.” In South America and Europe, the band has asked its fans to pick 17 songs on their set list and has reserved the 18th spot for the new song, which will premiere in Bogotá, Colombia, on March 16th.

Pressed for a song title, Ulrich scoffs. “Are you kidding me?” he says. “That’s six weeks from now. We played two new songs on the 2006 tour, right when we were writing and getting ready to record Death Magnetic. At those gigs, they were very, very eloquently entitled ‘New Song 1’ and ‘New Song 2.’ You can’t fuck with that.”

For Hammett, writing new music isn’t the only thing keeping him busy. He’s also been working on his first-ever horror convention, Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil, which he’s holding this Friday and Saturday at San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom.

He describes the fest as an extension of the “Kirk’s Crypt” exhibit at the band’s Orion Music and More festivals. For this event, the guitarist has reserved an entire hotel floor to show off his collection of horror memorabilia.

“We want people to experience it, to feel it, to interact with it, to make it like a cool place to hang out for a couple days,” he says. “That’s how comic-book conventions were when I was a teenager in the late Seventies, early Eighties. They were just total geek affairs.”

Source: Rolling Stone