Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett says he and Metallica plan to start work on their next album once their current tour winds up next November.
To that end, Hammett has already cooked up hundreds of riffs for when the band is ready to begin work on the record, the follow-up to their 2023 release, 72 Seasons.
“I have 767 new ones for the next album,” Hammett tells Rolling Stone of the riffs.
“It is such a nightmare going through this stuff, too,” he added of the surfeit of riffs. “And I’m the one responsible for all of it and I can’t do it.”
Hammett’s riffs have been behind countless Metallica tracks. As he told Guitar Player in 2020, his talent for it was fueled by players like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Michael Schenker, as well as through under-the-radar selections by Judas Priest and Santana.
He still has many months to sort through his riffs and stockpile additional ideas while Metallica are on the road for 72 Seasons.
“I don’t foresee us starting the next album for at least another year because we’re still finishing the tour,” he says. “Once we fully finish this and go to all the outlying places like Asia and Australia and New Zealand, I think we’re gonna take a little bit of a break, not too much of one, and then we’re gonna get right back into it.”
In addition to Metallica’s next album, the guitarist is planning his first full-length solo album to follow-up on his 2022 debut EP, Portals.
“I’m just actively getting ideas together for my solo album,” he told Rolling Stone. “I guess the best way to describe it is it’s gonna be a fusion of all sorts of styles….
“All of a sudden I’m writing classical progressions, and all of a sudden I’m writing more heavy stuff and all of a sudden I’m writing like a funk thing….
“There will be vocals because the songs that I wrote scream for vocals this time around.”
Hammett says it’s too early to know who will do the honor of singing the material. But he does have an instrumental piece in the lineup that “sounds like it’s 2000 years old called ‘The Mysterion.’ It’s based on all this stuff that I’ve been reading, the ancient Greek texts, and it’s amazing to me because I wouldn’t have had this instrumental if I didn’t start reading these ancient texts.”
Hammett also pondered the possibility Metallica might revisit its controversial late 1990s Load and Re-Load albums again.
“Who knows? We might just say, ‘Okay, let’s go back to the ’90s again,” he suggest. “It’s not a bad idea!”
He says that while those albums were not well-received by fans back in the day, some of their audience seem to have come around to the records.
“When Load and Reload came out, there was a lot of backlash,” he says. “But nowadays I run into fans and they love that era. We play ‘Fuel’ and people go nuts. We play ‘Until It Sleeps’ and people know every word.
“It’s kind of like how when I was a teenager, I listened to all the Zeppelin albums except Zeppelin III because it was more acoustic and I just wanted the high-energy aggressive stuff. But over time I really came to embrace Zeppelin III and how wonderful it is.”
However Hammett is storing his new song ideas, one hopes he keeps a better hold on it than he did in 2014, when he lost his phone containing his riff ideas while at Copenhagen Airport. Metallica were working on their album Hardwired…to Self-Destruct at the time. The loss meant the guitarist had nothing to contribute to that record.
"I put riffs on my iPhone, but something very unfortunate happened to me about six months ago,” the electric guitar player told The Jasta Show in 2018. “I lost my iPhone [containing] 250 musical ideas. And I was crushed. It didn't get backed up.
“To try to remember those riffs? I can only remember, like, eight of 'em.”
In related news, Hammett and Gibson Publishing announced the guitarist’s new book last week. Titled The Collection: Kirk Hammett, the 400-page book spotlights some 65 guitars from the Metallica axeman's stash, including his famous “Greeny” Gibson Les Paul Standard, formerly owned by Peter Green and Gary Moore, and his 1979 Gibson Flying V.
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