Metallica have announced plans for a European summer tour. The band will allow fans to choose the setlist at each gig, voting among back-catalogue tunes as well as hearing some of the group's "brand new" songs.

Tickets go on sale today for two of three German concerts, both in June 2014, with more gigs to be revealed next week. Overall, Metallica will play "a couple of weeks" on this side of the Atlantic; these will mark their first European dates in about two years.

Last month, members of the band revealed that they have begun writing their first album in almost six years. "There 800 riffs we're going through," James Hetfield told the Oakland Press. Lars Ulrich described the sorting process as a series of "dances": "Up at HQ in northern California, we've already done, what, two or three dances," he explained to the Huffington Post. "95% of our records come from jams - literally pre-concert jams, tuning room jams, all this kind of stuff - so ... the biggest time-consuming element of us making a record is listening to all the [jams] that we've recorded ... [We] grade them: Five stars, four stars, three stars, and then we take all the five stars bits and try to make songs out of them."

Although their European concerts will mostly incorporate familiar material, Metallica will also use the gigs to debut new work. Every night, the rockers will play at least one new cut. The other 17 songs on the setlist will be selected by ticketholders, voting from among the band's almost 140 recorded tracks. "The fact that all our nutty fans will pick the songs we play should be some next level fun and take a big load off my shoulders as the guy who usually writes the set list!" Ulrich said in a press release.

While Metallica haven't released a studio LP since 2008's chart-topping Death Magnetic, they are currently promoting their 3D concert movie, Through The Nether, and its accompanying soundtrack. According to Box Office Mojo, despite a budget of about $18m (£11m), Through The Nether has only grossed about $3.4m (£2.1m) in cinema receipts.