Metallica and Lou Reed to release album together

In November, Lou Reed and Metallica will release the joint album 'Lulu'.

Reed and Metallica first got together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concerts in October 2009. The band backed Reed and performed his Velvet Underground classics 'Sweet Jane' and 'White Light/White Heat'. "We knew from then that we were made for each other," Reed says.

The original idea was to record an album of old Lou Reed songs but then Reed came up with a new idea. He wanted to record songs he had written for the German theater group production 'Lulu Plays'.

"We were very interested in working with Lou," says Hetfield. "I had these giant question marks: What's it going to be like? What's going to happen? So it was great when he sent us the lyrics for the Lulu body of work. It was something we could sink our teeth into. I could take off my singer and lyricist hat and concentrate on the music part. These were very potent lyrics, with a soundscape behind them for atmosphere. Lars and I sat there with an acoustic and let this blank canvas take us where it needed to go. It was a great gift, to be asked to stamp 'TALLICA on it. And that's what we did."

"We had to bring Lulu to life in a sophisticated way, using rock," Reed says. "And the hardest power rock you could come up with would have to be Metallica. They live on that planet. We played together, and I knew it: dream come true. This is the best thing I ever did. And I did it with the best group I could possibly find. By definition, everybody involved was honest. This has come into the world pure. We pushed as far as we possibly could within the realms of reality."

"It's definitely not a Metallica album, or a Lou Reed album," adds Hammett. "It's something else. It's a new animal, a hybrid."

Warner Brothers will release the album on November 1, 2011.