METALLICA's LARS ULRICH On Next CD: 'It's Too Early To Tell'

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich recently spoke to Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles writer Martin Popoff about the group's next studio CD, which he said might see the light of day "late spring"…

"It's too early. I can't... you know, we have this website where we try to talk about what's going on in the studio and we put pictures out," Ulrich stated. "The hardest thing about it is to try and come up with ways to say, you know, 'We're in the studio' (laughs) there's not really anything to say. You know, song 17 vs. song 12… it's such a fucking blur. We have a lot of material and in the last couple of days we're working on just sort of trying to nail it down. It's a new thing for us, because we had never done anything other than write... 'OK, let's write ten songs for an album.' Every song we've ever written has been on an album. We've never done the old, 30 songs and let's take the best ten. That's a little bit new for us. I think we were sort of guilty in the past, especially the 'Load' and 'Reload' stuff, of not editing ourselves. So we're sort of dealing with that at the moment, which is kind of weird (laughs)."

Is your best work in front of you? Are you excited about the future?

"Oh yeah! I mean, I'm really excited about it. Obviously it's been an interesting couple of years. I think there's some great energy, there's some great... I don't know how to explain it. It's like it just bleeds differently. I don't know, it's like if you peeled the skin off somebody and you know that layer... I think that James' lyrics, and even some of the music, from the last couple months, there's a kind of directness to it. It's about moments or trying to not overthink it, overproduce it. We're trying not to beat the life out of it, which I think we had sort of done on the previous couple of records. It got to the point where we sort of produced all the life out of it. So there's some really great moments, some energy, some moments of people playing music together in a room, and it has a lot of soul. We're sort of like, what? 30, 35 songs into this and over the course of that there's a lot of different types of stuff, fast stuff, slow stuff, kind of super-heavy stuff, some stuff that's a little more experimental, a lot of different stuff, fucked-up-sounding stuff. But I would say we're trying to hone it in and figure out. You know, what kind of statement do we want to make with this record? That's sort of like where we are right now. So I would say we're probably within two or three months of finishing and hopefully some time, I would say late spring, is probably a pretty good bet. Did that make any sense (laughs)?"

With regards to what may happen to all the extra material, Lars said: "Probably, b-sides, Fan Can stuff, maybe the odd soundtrack. And I imagine some of them will be left (laughs). It's sort of like, is it actually possible to write something and then disregard it? It gets into that kind of - which we were a little guilty of - 'We're so good that anything we write is just good and should be put out.' You can also write something that you decide to NOT put out (laughs). You can't write something and then un-write it. It's like, what if you wrote a great song and didn't record it? (big laugh). What if you wrote a great song and just left it in the room? These types of things. It's a different headspace, I can tell you (laughs)."

(Thanks: BW&BK)