LARS ULRICH Talks To SPIN Magazine About New METALLICA Album; Audio Available

William Goodman of Spin.com conducted an interview with METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich earlier today (Thursday, May 15) about the group's much-anticipated new record, which, according to Lars, the outfit will cap next week with "a couple of nips and tucks" for release this September.

Here are some bullet points from Lars' comments about the forthcoming CD:

* The yet-to-be titled new record will drop sometime in September.
* The quartet will wrap production on the record next week, "by Wednesday or Thursday," Ulrich confirms.
* The band hit the studio "with 26 songs," then "went down to 14 with Rick [Rubin, producer]" and recorded 11. Only 10 songs will make the final tracklisting due to constraints of physical media.
* The album's tunes "are long songs ... we're talking seven-minute, eight-minute, nine-minute nutty-ass songs. We don't make them long or short on purpose; you just kind of do what feels natural. We're not really gonna edit them, (so) we're gonna lose another one at some point in the next month or so and probably end up with 10."
* Sonically, the songs are "definitely pretty all over the place. There's a lot of variation, a lot of fast, slow, melodic ... kind of hardcore, nutty super-fast speed stuff. It's a little more like how some of the earlier records were a little more dynamic within the songs."
* This week the quartet have been working with its graphic designer on the album art.
* In the recording of the new set METALLICA was seeking "a little bit of a more sane environment," unlike the records they produced in the early '90s, "[which] were just completely stressed-out and just nutty, that we were gonna try and have a little more sane environment and we've actually, surprising mostly to ourselves, been able to keep to that. We've pretty much finished the music now, so all the next level stuff is just starting to go down."

Listen to Spin.com's four-minute interview with Lars below.