Metallica's Kirk Hammett, the guitar hero who had me hacking away at tablature books in my basement for hours as a middle schooler trying to replicate every finger tap, string bend, and hammer-on, has a bunch of new projects in the queue. Hammett has a new 400-page coffee table book called The Collection: Kirk Hammett showcasing his collection of guitars, which occasioned a visit to the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. During the pod, he gave an update on two new albums that should be of interest to Metallica fans.
For one thing, Hammett is plotting his debut solo album — and unlike his debut solo EP, 2022's Portals, this one will feature guest vocalists. His comments on the LP:
I’m just actively getting ideas together for my [first] solo album. 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. So I’m like, okay, who’s gonna be doing the vocals? I don’t know. I hope I’m not—I already have too much to do on stage… I have an instrumental piece that to me 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.
Don't worry, the solo material does not mean Hammett has been putting Metallica on the back burner. He says he's written 767 riffs for the band's next album. (Is that kind of like when pop stars say they've written 100 songs for their new album?) Hammett says it'll be at least a year before the band really gets to work on new music because they have to finish touring "all the outlying places like Asia and Australia and New Zealand" in support of 2023's 72 Seasons and then take a little break — "not too much of one, and then we’re gonna get right back into it."
