Though a couple of video projects — including a 3D movie for next year — are dominating Metallica‘s time at the moment, the group is getting ready to start making some new musical noise in the not-too-distant future.
Guitarist Kirk Hammett — who’s busy with a book about his horror memorabilia, “Too Much Horror Business,” and a new line of Kirk Von Hammett horror toys — tells Billboard, “We’re going to seriously start thinking about making a new album soon. We have tons of ideas, and that really is never a problem. We never have a lack of ideas — if anything, the problem is we have too many ideas. But, yeah… it’s something we’re gonna start thinking pretty seriously about here. In about a couple months or so we’re gonna seriously start working it out.”
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Before that, however, Metallica is focused on the Dec. 10 release of “Quebec Magnetic,” a two-DVD/Blu-ray concert set filmed by Wayne Isham during a two-night stand in October of 2009 in Quebec City — which will also be Metallica’s first self-released project. “We just played two really phenomenal shows. They were outrageously great and the audience was great and we had a bunch of people filming it,” Hammett recalls. “We felt like we’re really doing a disservice just sitting on this great live footage, so we decided to put it out.” “Quebec Magnetic” will feature one entire show and eight bonus songs taken from the other performance.
The 3D movie, directed by Nimrod Antal and due out in the summer of 2013, will combine performance footage from August at Rogers Arena in Vancouver with what Hammett describes as “a storyline that weaves in and out of the film…but there’s no real dialogue. The storyline actually involves the band, and it’s a very cool thing. I’m really looking forward to it.” The film will feature professional actors, including Dean DeHaan (“Chronicle,” “Lawless,” HBO’s “True Blood”) as “a Metallica fan, and his performance is just as intense as our own performance.”
Hammett adds that he and his bandmates are currently “kind of working our way through the audio portion of this 3D movie, just making sure that everything`s right, and the same with the ‘Quebec’ DVD. We’re kind of working our way through it and making sure everything’s right with it — the packaging’s right, the sound is right, the editing’s right.”
But he’s still taking time to enjoy promoting “Too Much Horror Business,” which lets fans take a peak at the horror goods Hammett has collected over the years — including the “holy grail” suit that Boris Karloff wore in the 1934 film “The Black Cat.” Hammett displayed some of his artifacts in Kirk’s Crypt at this year’s Orion Festival, and says that he hopes to bring out even more for the 2013 edition of the event. “The idea for the next Orion Festival is to do a Kirk’s Crypt that’s two stories high,” he says. “We need a second floor and we need more entrances, too, because the line was just ridiculously long. The idea is bigger and better.”