During a yesterday’s “The Metal Tour Of The Year” streaming event hosted by SiriusXM‘, MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine spoke about the progress of the recording sessions for the band’s follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia album.
“Dirk [Verbeuren, drums] and David Ellefson [bass] both just finished their parts,” he said. “And this was probably one of the strongest records we’ve ever had as far as duration. The other records we’ve done have all done been different lengths, and our [record] contract that we have [to deliver] for one company, it’s eight songs, for another company, it’s 11 songs, so, realistically, all we need to do is do an 11-song album and we’re done, right? That’s not the way old Uncle Dave is, though.
“So we got in the studio and we started working and it got to where we were writing all the original parts, and we had 15 of ’em,” he continued. “And then we got to the end, and I said, ‘Shoot, we didn’t think about the cover songs, man.’ We had a couple of songs we wanted to do for this record. ‘Damn, we forgot. What are we gonna do? Do you wanna still talk about it?’ ‘Yeah, we wanna talk about it.’ So we ended up doing 18 songs altogether, and then we had another song that we forgot was part of one of the other songs, so we had 19. [We] ditched one of the cover songs, so now we’ve got an 18-song album that we’re gonna be bringing.”
When asked about the musical direction of new album, Mustaine responded: “I think this is probably in the top four records as far as towards the tip of the spear with our career and everything that we’re doing. It’s up there with Countdown [To Extinction], Rust In Peace and probably Peace Sells. The other one I would say is Dystopia. So that would round up my top five.
