Untitled Metallica album

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This article contains information about a scheduled or expected future album.
It may contain information of a speculative nature and the content could change dramatically as the album release approaches and more information becomes available.

Metallica chronology
TBA

Studio album by Metallica
Released	Mid-Late 2007/Early 2008
Recorded	March 12, 2007 - ???
Label	Warner Bros. Records
Producer(s)	Rick Rubin, Metallica
Some Kind of Monster (2004)	Ninth Studio Album (2007)

Metallica's yet-to-be-titled ninth studio album is tentatively planned to be released in the summer of 2007.

At a press conference at Tallinn Song Festival Grounds in Estonia on June 13, 2006, James Hetfield said that the songwriting is "coming along exactly as [it] should. We're not rushing too much. [We're] taking our time. We want this to be just really good. We have a lot of material, which is better than the other way around. We're going to be [at it] a little while." Drummer Lars Ulrich recently told BBC Radio 1 that the new album will be in stores in the summer or early fall of 2007.^[1] The band recently announced that recording would begin on March 12, 2007 in Los Angeles.^[2]^[3]

The album's producer will be Rick Rubin, known for his work with The Beastie Boys, Slayer, Johnny Cash, System of a Down, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Danzig, and Linkin Park. ^[4]

According to frontman James Hetfield, the mood is much more relaxed than the recording of St. Anger.^[5] This will be the first studio album by Metallica released on Warner Bros. Records. Their last release with Elektra was the Some Kind of Monster EP. It will also be the first studio album to feature Robert Trujillo as the new bassist.

[edit] Songs

During their Escape from the Studio '06 tour, the band debuted two songs, temporarily titled "The New Song" and "The Other New Song". Notably, the two songs mark the first official writing credit for bassist Robert Trujillo on any Metallica song.^[6] Trujillo was hired after the recording of St. Anger; producer Bob Rock played bass for the entire album and shared writing credit on all the songs. In another hint of the album's direction, Ulrich mentions that the album will be more organic, and that Pro Tools would most likely not be used at all, like it had been for their last studio album.^[7]

"The New Song" debuted on the European leg of the tour on June 6, 2006 in Berlin, Germany. The song clocks in at around eight minutes, with Hetfield repeatedly singing "Death is not the end."^[8]
"The Other New Song" debuted August 12, 2006 in Seoul, Korea, and is much shorter, at just below four minutes.^[9]

Both songs are fast-paced and feature solos from Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, ending fan and critic belief that there would not be any future guitar solos from Metallica. Ulrich stated in the Some Kind of Monster movie that he was bored with traditional guitar solos, as proven on the St. Anger album.

According to Hammett, the band has written about fifteen songs for the new album.^[10] Trujillo adds that the band has about 50 hours of music and riffs to sift through for the next album.^[11]

Hammett was also recently quoted by the fanclub's "So What!" magazine as saying:

"There is a really unusual theme that's working it's way into the music. I'm not really sure how to react to it. Maybe it's someone else trying to tell us that we should react to it, but a lot of the music has an eastern harmonic flair to it, a harmonic minor flair to it, and when I say harmonic minor, that could be construed as like eastern sounding or Middle Eastern sounding or maybe Arabic? I don't know if it's just the zeitgeist, a sign of the times, or maybe because like, you know, Middle Eastern culture is so prevalent, or maybe the negative things about Middle Eastern culture. Maybe artists are conscious, just want to shine light on the positive aspects of Middle Eastern culture, i.e. the music. But there's passages that sound, that use harmonic minor and dominant, and those sounds are distinctly Arabic sounding or Middle Eastern sounding, and you hear them in all the songs. At the less likely times, all of a sudden they'll turn a corner and there we are, smack, right dab there in Syria or Iraq, as far as culture is concerned. We're playing notes that were played, have been played for thousands of years, that aren't born in western culture, and it's just a trip to see. And maybe I'm the first to really vocalize it, but it's just there."