Metallica’s Kirk Hammett: “I Still Feel Like We Haven’t Really Peaked”

Despite Load, Reload, St. Anger and Lulu (and, to a lesser degree, Death Magnetic and Hardwired… To Self-Destruct), Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett insists that the band has not yet peaked.

Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo spoke to San Francisco Giants broadcaster George Kontos about the band’s upcoming 40th-anniversary celebrations — Metallica are proud Bay Area natives and often run promotions with the team — and Kirk had the following to say:

“Man, it’s crazy when I think about four decades. ‘Cause I swear to God, it seems like just yesterday that we were on a tour bus somewhere in the middle of America, just trying to keep up with everything. And nowadays it’s just… Forty years passed so quickly. It’s amazing.

“What’s truly amazing now is the fact that I still feel like we haven’t really peaked, we’re still real hungry, we still wanna make music, we still care about music, we still care about each other. I don’t see any signs of us slowing down, man, ’cause we have stuff that we wanna do.”

I suppose Hammett could be measuring “peak” by any number of metrics such as album sales, live show attendance, etc., in which case it could be true that the band hasn’t yet peaked. But to the extent that he may believe the band hasn’t yet peaked creatively, well, at least he still feels the fire inside, I guess.

Trujillo added:

“You know, what’s insane about all this is that there’s no shortage of musical ideas and riffs and grooves and bass lines. A lot of times when bands have been around that long, there is a shortage — people run out of ideas — and we have the opposite problem; we’ve got too many ideas. So it’s a good problem to have.”

Speaking of new ideas, Metallica have been deep in “some pretty serious writing” for their next album since last November. After first floating the idea of working on new music while under quarantine last April, by June Lars Ulrich had revealed that Metallica were, indeed, in writing mode. James and Rob have both said they’ve been busy working on new songs, too, and Kirk Hammett has trumpeted the fact that he has over 600 song ideas recorded (after infamously losing his cell phone with 300+ ideas prior to the sessions for Hardwired). Hetfield stated this past May that the band had ten songs partially written.

[via Blabbermouth]