METALLICA Have Close To 20 Songs Written For Their New album

Metallica have been keeping a relatively low profile as of late. While last year, they scored a Guinness World Record, performed at a baseball game, acted in a SportsCentercommercial and narrated hunting shows, this year seems to be all about blueprinting and writing a new album, bachelor party aside.

In a new update from Lars Ulrich to Rolling Stone, the drummer reveals that the band has about 20 new songs ready to go for the new album, with the band hoping to start pre-production soon. They are in the "honing" and "tweaking" phase. Lars makes sure to state that the band is writing every day but it's still early in the process. That's progress, right?

The band also hope to change up how they record. Rather than go into the studio with fully completed songs, they hope to blur the line between pre-production and production:

"In our world, there's been a distinct difference between the creative phase and the recording phase," he says. "With this project, we're trying to bridge the two a little more organically and not have there be such a great divide between the processes. We want to see if we can bring some of the creative curiosity, the impulsive stuff that happens when you're first playing a song into the studio.

"You want to tweak it and get it good, but you also want to record it in a way where it doesn't feel labored over and overthought," he continues. "We're trying to figure out where that line is."

The last time the band went into the studio without a solid idea of what the music will sound like, we got St. Anger. And we know how well that turned out.

While they have no plans for release just yet, Ulrich says the fans will know when it's close. He stated when he says the band is close to being done, that means they're a month out, but there is still a long ways away from there. He also added that the band hope to unveil some new songs on their string of festival dates this summer.

Last summer, on the band's string of festival dates, they premiered a new song, "Lords of Summer" which Lars recently revisited and enjoyed: "I heard 30 seconds of 'Lords of Summer' on the preview, and I was like, 'Wow, it actually sounds pretty good.' I hadn't remembered it since we played it last, and I was like, 'It's not so bad.'"