Good news continues to mount for Metallica fans that have long waited for the band to release a new record. In a recent interview, the band’s lead guitar player revealed that the group hopes to have the whole thing finished by September.

Kirk Hammett touched on the status of the nascent project. “We have a backlog of riffs in the riff bank," he told Guitar World. "Now it’s about picking riffs out, putting them together and moving along,” he said. “Later, we’ll revisit it all and see where it goes. We’ve all said to each other that September is gonna be the time when we buckle down. I know I told everyone it was gonna be last January…but that’s just the way it goes!”

Hammett discussed some of the factors that have held things up along the way. “We totally want to make an album," he declared. "But we have all these other touring commitments, and we have families now. It’s gonna be summertime soon, and it’s hard to work because the kids are out of school."

It’s been almost six years since the release of the last full-length Metallica studio album ‘Death Magnetic.’ The band have kept busy in the meantime with a variety of projects including 'Lulu,' their 2011 head-scratching collaboration with Lou Reed and with last year’s feature length film and live album ‘Metallica: Through The Never.’

In March, the group stunned the world with the surprise release of a new song titled ‘Lords of Summer’ which was tagged as a garage demo. In the same interview with Guitar World, Hammett talked about the basic nature of the new song. “We told everyone that the song was a demo version…and the solo is really a demo version,” he said. “If you compare the solo in the demo version to what I’ve been playing live at those South American shows, it’s a lot better and more refined now."

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