Metallica & Lou Reed Launch Website

The album is expected before the end of the year, but as neither Metallica nor Lou Reed have a label at the moment it's unclear who will release it.

However they have released the website www.loureedmetallica.com so we can probably expect an announcement in the coming weeks.

All ten of the album's songs are composed by Reed but they have been largely arranged by the metal legends.

"A marriage made in heaven," Reed told Rolling Stone earlier this year. "I knew it from the first day we played together: 'Oh, man, this is perfection, right in front of me.'"

"I don't think we've ever felt this free," Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich added. "There's nothing that's totally outside of the boundary for us, nothing that feels like 'Oh, what happens if we go there?' The strength of us" - he gestures at Reed - "is it feels like we cannot land on a wrong place."

"They're bringing Metallica, with all that power," Reed confirms. "And because they're pretty sophisticated, wherever I go, they're still with me."

After performing together for the first time at a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame show in 2009 the band and Reed originally planned to re-record some forgotten older Reed songs ("fallen jewels that no one remembered"), however that plan was shelved when the former Velvet Underground man turned up at Metallica's studios in San Francisco for the first of the two short recording sessions that resulted in the record. Reed brought with him a set of songs that he had originally written for Lulu a theatrical production based on stories by the German author Frank Wedekind.

"We are free to go wherever," Ulrich says. "I'm obviously psyched for people to hear this, in whatever way we feel is right."

Hetfield has one condition. "I told Lou I want to be there when people hear it," he says, grinning. "I want to see their faces."