Legendary industrial metal band Rammstein is nearly finished with their new album, due out in 2019. The band shared their progress via photos posted to their social media accounts. Although unconfirmed by the band, previous interviews with the band in the last few years indicate this may be their last album and a world tour to follow.
Last year in an interview, guitarist Richard Kruspe commented about the album being their last:
“That’s a feeling — I can be wrong, but just at the moment, I feel like this is maybe the last [shot at making an album] we have, and I wanna give two hundred percent in that and make it as good as it can be,” he explained. “When I listen to the stuff, there’s so much potential, and I’m very pleased about what we do at the moment.”
About the bands’ lengthly spells between new released:
“There’s a different reason for everything, obviously. First of all, the music industry has changed a lot. It used to be that the main income for bands would be making records and selling records. That has changed. Secondly, we always believed, and we didn’t have any other chances to believe in our show. In the beginning of RAMMSTEIN, nobody would play any songs on the radio, nobody would take our videos and show ’em on TV — we had a lot of trouble with that — so the only chance we had was to really focus on our live show. And we didn’t know at this point that it would have changed after [so many] years. Our focus was always playing live in the beginning.
“As a European, or a German band especially, you have to tour much more than other, American bands,” he continued. “They play their market and then they come to Europe and play maybe two or whatever, five or ten, shows — that’s it. So we always had to play the European market and go back to America, so we played much more, I guess. So we always had a different rhythm. And also, the other reason is that when we do a record, it takes forever, because, again, we’re six members that have six different opinions about everything and everyone in the band thinks that he’s on the right path. So it’s a lot of discussion and compromising — it takes a lot of time until we finish a record. But at the moment, we’re really in a situation that we don’t have to do it. We’re really kind of privileged to not having any pressure — there’s no record companies or managements or something; it’s only us that put pressure on us. And we’re at that point in our lives that we kind of feel that we wanna be sure that what we do is worth putting out. And we also wanna have the freedom to say, ‘You know what? That’s not good enough. Let’s just don’t do it.’ It’s a real privilege to do so, and I’m happy that we’re in this situation.”
In 2016 and 2017, Rammstein played a number of concerts where the band opened each show with a brand new song, presently only known as “Ramm 4”. The track contained lyrics that seemed to be a combination of various titles of past Rammstein songs.