Obviously, we'll have a brand-new Apocalyptica album by the end of the year. It seems the Finnish quartet (cellists Eicca Toppinen, Perttu Kivilaakso and Paavo Lötjönen, and percussionist Mikko Sirén) is putting the finishing touches to composing another dozen of cello metal cuts. Here's what mainman Eicca has revealed about it in the band's blog on Apocalyptica's official MySpace profile:

"There will be no shows before the album release which will be somewhere around September/October, and the only exception will be a show in Japan in May. After the release our plan is to tour basically the whole world for two years... We'll start the drum recordings in March. We'll record 13-15 tracks, and the album will have something between 10 and 15 songs. It will be produced by Jacob Hellner (Rammstein, Clawfinger, etc.)..."

Regarding guest vocals on the album, Eicca states:

"One American metal/rock singer has been recorded already. There might be some more American singers, pretty famous ones, from the rock or metal genre. We are focused on getting one female voice as well. Our target is to get 3 or 4 vocal tracks in the album..."