German industrial metallers RAMMSTEIN are tentatively scheduled to release their long-awaited new album in April 2019. The follow-up to 2009's "Liebe Ist Für Alle Da" is being mixed at a Los Angeles studio with Rich Costey, an American producer who has previously worked with MUSE, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE and FRANZ FERDINAND, among others.

RAMMSTEIN guitarist Richard Z. Kruspe spoke to Heavy Consequence about the band's upcoming disc while promoting "A Million Degrees", the third effort from his EMIGRATE side project.

"Everything with RAMMSTEIN takes forever, because there are six people, plus an engineer and a producer, and we all have opinions about it," he said "It's just going very slow, and it's very time consuming, and sometimes frustrating. Eventually, I think it's going to be an album that has a certain kind of potential that RAMMSTEIN hasn't achieved yet. For me, one of the reasons to step back into making records with RAMMSTEIN was to balance the popularity of the band as a live act with the actual music. With RAMMSTEIN, people tend to talk about the fire and all the live stuff. I thought, 'I don't want to be another KISS,' where people talk about makeup and stuff like that and no one talks about the music."

Regarding the musical direction of the new RAMMSTEIN material, Kruspe said: "I wanted to do a record that stands out even more than our past records, and I kind of find when I listen to the [new] record, it's like RAMMSTEIN 3D, if I can summarize it. We're happy to work with my good friend Olsen Involtini, who also worked on EMIGRATE records. He a great friend of mine, and he brought certain kind of harmonies into the world of RAMMSTEIN, which I like."

As for when fans can expect to hear RAMMSTEIN's new album, Kruspe said: "We're finishing up the last mixes, and it's going to come out probably in April of 2019."

RAMMSTEIN recently announced a batch of summer 2019 European tour dates. The run of stadium and arena shows will kick off on May 27 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany and end of August 23 in Vienna, Austria.

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 previous RAMMSTEIN songs.