Kirk Hammett recently suggested Metallica may have a new album on the way, telling NME he couldn’t talk about it.
In a more recent interview with Guitar World, Hammett was asked outright about the rumours – and responded that the band wasn’t exactly sitting around doing nothing throughout the pandemic.
“Well, let’s just say that over the COVID years, we weren’t just sitting around on the couch texting each other, complaining about how we couldn’t work,” he told the mag. “That was the exact opposite of what happened! We’ve been working through the lost years – so you can draw your own conclusions from that!”
A new Metallica record would be the band’s first release since 2016’s Hardwired… to Self-Destruct.
In another recent interview about his new solo release, Portals, Hammett mentioned Metallica engineer Greg Fidelman twice, saying he “had his hands full with all sorts of other Metallica stuff” and “he was up to his neck in other Metallica commitments.”
Of course, that could mean mixing live material, or working on the Load and Reload box sets. But it could mean new music, too.
Hammett told Guitar World that he personally was “pretty active” during COVID, writing “a ton of different types of music.”
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“I wrote Metallica music, I wrote the Portals music – all different types of music that I’m sitting on, and it’s a lot of varied stuff,” he said. “I can safely say that I’m not done writing this type of music because I really, really enjoy it and it feels different.”
Although the band as a whole hasn’t addressed any new music rumours, they have recently teamed up with interactive educational music service Yousician, giving fans three in-depth lessons on how to play Metallica classics with real-time feedback.
