METALLICA: New Photos From Tucson, Irvine Posted Online

Legendary rock photographer Ross Halfin has posted a number of pictures taken at METALLICA's recent concerts in Tucson, Arizona and Irvine, California:

* Photo: Kirk Hammett's world has been turned upside down
* Photos: Friday, May 16 at the annual KFMA Day music festival at the Pima County Fairgrounds in Tucson, Arizona
* Photos: Saturday, May 17 at the annual "Weenie Roast" festival sponsored by Los Angeles radio station KROQ-FM at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Irvine, California

As previously reported, METALLICA has tapped Greg Fidelman an engineer/producer who has worked with current METALLICA producer Rick Rubin on albums for the RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS, SYSTEM OF A DOWN, SLIPKNOT and AUDIOSLAVE, among others to mix its new CD, which is due out in September.

During a May 14 interview with The Pulse of Radio, Ulrich said that the group hopes to wrap up work on the album in time for the Memorial Day weekend holiday. "It's pretty close," he said. "We've got four studio days next week to just patch up. If there's a last minute, you know, 'that needs this...' or but pretty much done. Yeah, it's pretty much done. And then they start mixing the week after."

Lars also took part in a conference call on May 15 to promote this year's Bonnaroo festival, which METALLICA will headline on June 13, Ulrich told reporters that METALLICA recently met with a graphic designer to begin planning the new CD package, though there's no confirmed title for the album yet and the songs still have working names.

"We sort of promised ourselves that unlike all the records we made in the '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," Ulrich said, according to Billboard.com. "We've pretty much finished the music now, so all the next level stuff is just starting to go down."

Ulrich said METALLICA wrote 26 songs for the new CD but ended up finalizing about 14 of them with producer Rick Rubin. A total of 11 have actually been tracked for the album, though Ulrich said "length issues" might mean one more has to be eliminated.

"These are long songs ... we're talking seven-minute, eight-minute, nine-minute nutty-ass songs," Ulrich revealed. "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."

Ulrich described the material as "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."

The band next plays the Bonnaroo festival in mid-June, a series of European festivals, and the newly configured one-day Ozzfest this August in Dallas.

METALLICA performing at the annual "Weenie Roast" festival: