Jason Newsted has revealed that he’s putting together two new projects – and they’ll see him returning to his heavy roots.
The ex-Metallica bassist has spent the last few years out of the limelight, biut in a new radio interview with Gator 98.7 FM's Gator Garage, he said that he spent much of last year working on the debut album from his long-running group The Chophouse Band.
“Actually, I spent six months of last year putting together The Chophouse Band Volume 1. The Chophouse Band has been together making music since 1992. So it was our first album after 30 years. I spent a lot of time on that. And then, once I got that under my belt, I'm kind of stepping back into the heavy now.”
Newsted added that he was also auditioning for musicians for two new heavy bands that he’s in the process of putting together.
“I’m kind of stepping back into the heavy now. So the last couple of weeks I’ve been auditioning guitar players for a heavy project. I’m back on bass and singing with a metal drummer – double bass, you know; getting’ loud again. So I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. I’m putting two new projects together right now – but loud.”
Newsted teased his return to heavier territory in an interview in April 2022, explaining that he had retooled The Chophouse Band so it was comparable to some of the groups he’d been in before.
“The Chophouse Band started out as almost a bluegrass-tinged thing, and now it gets to some places that are as heavy as anything else that I’d been involved with – Voivod, Ozzy, Metallica, Newsted band, any of that stuff – it gets to those places now.
“I can actually really concentrate on playing the guitar and then singing that background stuff. And there’s screaming and some [growling] also. So I still haven’t lost that.
“And it lets people know that there’s still one foot in that place. You can take the boy out of the metal [but] you can’t take the metal out of the boy; it’s just the way it’s always gonna be.“
Newsted was a member of Arizona thrashers Flotsam & Jetsam before replacing the late Cliff Burton in Metallica in 1986, staying with the latter until 2001. His most recent release was 2013’s Heavy Metal Music, by the band Newsted.
