Metallica Tease ‘In-Your-Face Year’

Other than a mega pre-Super Bowl show last month, Metallica have been lying low so far this year. Nevertheless, they’re anticipating a very busy 2016. Although they have no tour dates on the books as of right now, Lars Ulrich tells Rolling Stone that will change once they get past one big hurdle.

“I think it will be a pretty in-your-face year, at least the back half of it,” the drummer says. “Obviously, we’ve gotta finish the new record now. But thankfully we’re quite far along. Hopefully we should be able to knock that on the head this spring, I would guess. So we will be gearing up and playing shows and doing all that fun stuff again soon.”

Progress on the record is moving steadily, as the group fine-tunes the nearly 20 song ideas they were working with last spring. Kirk Hammett told Rolling Stone last month that the band had “a bunch of songs, more than enough songs” in the works, and that at that point in time he was beginning to zero in on his guitar sound using his own brand of guitar effects pedals. “We’re slogging away,” he said. “But you know, it’s metal. It’s heavy.”

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They’ve also teased some new music by posting one video of James Hetfield playing a crushing riff and another, for which you have to be a Metallica fan club member to see, that finds Hetfield playing a Pro Tools session containing a sample of what sounds like a finished song with vocals.

In a recent interview concerning the 30th anniversary of Master of Puppets, Ulrich said he marveled at the way the group wrote a record in what he remembers to be eight weeks. He estimates the band spent about nine months working on the music for the new record. “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. “There are 75 different ways to play something, and you end up fucking driving yourself nutty.”