News•January 17, 2014 3:21 PM ET•5,788 views

Metallica set to begin work on new album

In a new interview with Billboard.com, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett reveals that the band will soon commence work on the follow up to 2008's Death Magnetic. Hammett had the following to say:

"[We will begin] in a couple of weeks. When we start, that's going to be our main priority, and we're pretty excited about it because we've been saying we need to start working on this album, but we've been procrastinating greatly with it. We've pretty much come up with every sort of excuse we can not to start work on the album, but we've run out of excuses, so we pretty much have to start work on it now."

However, Hammett tells Billboard that it's going to be a challenge to orchestrate their glut of new ideas and riffs:

" We're a band that never has a shortage of ideas. You hear about these bands that are sitting in the studio and they don't have any songs, what are they gonna do? That's not Metallica. Metallica's problem is the total opposite. We have too many ideas. James [Hetfield] has, like, 800 ideas. I have 400. Those number alone are just crazy. That's formidable."