Dave Mustaine Compares the New Megadeth Album to Peace Sells, Rust in Peace, and Countdown to Extinction

 Will the sixteenth (!) Megadeth album be any good? Hey, it’s a fair question. Megadeth’s career has had some peaks and valleys, creatively speaking.
But for what it’s worth, Dave Mustaine seems to think very, very highly of the record… with an important caveat.

Talking to SiriusXM’s Jose Mangin as part of this past Friday’s “The Metal Tour of the Year” streaming event, Mustaine said of the band’s upcoming offering, which they’ve recently begun recording:
 

“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… But Who’s Buying?. The other one I would say is Dystopia. So that would round up my top five.”

That’s quite a bold claim, obviously (although MetalSucks readers seem to disagree about the inclusion of Dystopia on a list of the band’s top five releases). Mustaine is Babe Ruthing it here. That’s the kinda thing that could really come back to bite a musician in the tuchus.

Which Mustaine seems to know, because he added:

“Honestly, it’s kind of lame when guys have new records and they go, ‘Oh, this is my favorite one,’ because we all do that. This is a good record, but I don’t have any words to it yet, so…”

Well, Amanowar to that, brother! Were it only that other metal folk would take note and drop the whole “This next record is gonna be our heaviest/ fastest/ bestest one yet” spiel. Not only is it tired, but you really have no way of knowing how anything is gonna be received by fans and critics until it’s released. Great shit gets overlooked, mediocre dreck sells a gajillion copies, time makes people reconsider or uphold initial opinions. That’s just the nature of art, regardless of the medium or genre.

In any case, whether we end up with Rust in Peace or Super Collider, we know one thing about the new Megadeth record for sure: there will be a lot of it!

“We got in the studio and started working. It got to where we were writing all the original parts and we had 15 of them. We got to the end, and I said, ‘We didn’t think about the cover songs!’ We had a couple of songs we wanted to do for this record, so we ended up doing 18 songs altogether.

“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 going to be bringing.”

[via Metal Hammer]