Metallica has talked about the new album in several interviews lately. If we put all the facts together we get a good view of what we can expect.

Kirk Hammet and Lars Ulrich were interviewed by San Francisco Examiner where they said We don’t want pretty good, we want excellent and Rick Rubin is getting us to try and achieve that. He’s very good at getting the essence of an artist out and bringing that back to the top again. It’s the ‘Master of Puppets’ mentality again. You need to prove the world that you’re good, you need to be hungry again.

Kirk ads "I have difficulty wading through all the ideas because I’m biased — I think everything we do has a lot of merit to it. In that regard Rick Rubin is great because he will just say, ‘Such and such a part is not good, so come up with something else.’ He just leaves the problem up to us and we just solve it between ourselves without too much interference from his side, which is completely different from [longtime METALLICA producer] Bob Rock whose musical thinking would permeate the record. Rick Rubin leaves a lot of the musical problem solving to ourselves, which keeps it more pure."

”Rick thought it’d be beneficial for the gang to get out of the comfort zone of our back yards,” drummer Lars Ulrich tells RollingStone.com. “We’ve been tripping up and down to L.A. since April, and the results have been better than good.” As of Thanksgiving, the only hurdles left are overdubs and James Hetfield’s vocals. “That’s it,” says Ulrich. “We’re very alive and well.”