Metallica working on new album Asher January 17, 2014 News Metallica are hoping to finally start working on their next album after a busy couple of weeks ahead, including guitarist Kirk Hammett’s inaugural Fear FestEviL in San Francisco, a Grammy’s performance with classical pianist Lang Lang and the DVD/Blu-ray release of Metallica Through The Never. Hammett tells Billboard that the quartet will start working on the follow-up to 2008’s Death Magnetic “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.”