Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine has heaped praise on the band’s Finnish guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari, describing him as the piece the group had been chasing for a long time. Speaking during the band’s appearance at the Tuska festival in Helsinki, Mustaine called the homecoming gig a special moment for Mäntysaari, who joined Megadeth in September 2023 after the departure of Kiko Loureiro.
In an interview with Finland’s “Radio City“, Mustaine said he was thrilled to see Mäntysaari perform in front of his home crowd, hailing him as a point of national pride.
“Yeah, I’m excited. I’m really excited for Teemu because he’s never played here [in Finland] with us. And Teemu is a national treasure here — the first Finnish man to ever have a Number One record in America. So I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing him have success. ‘Cause he’s such a wonderful person and is a perfect example of the Finnish spirit of people — they’re nice, they’re intelligent, they’re wonderful people. And he’s been the missing link that we’ve been looking for for many, many years,” he said.
Mustaine recalled that Mäntysaari was reserved at first, a natural reaction to stepping up from a smaller act into one of metal’s biggest names.
“Well, he was very, very shy when we first hired him, because you go from being in a smaller band into a bigger band, obviously there’s gonna be a little bit of an adapting period,” he recalled. “But Megadeth is not a little bigger band — it’s a lot f**king bigger. So, I promised him, I said, ‘Your life’s gonna change. And it’s gonna change to where you’re gonna be the happiest you’ve ever been, beyond your wildest dreams.’ And that’s happened. We’re [super tight] on stage. We play like we’ve been playing together forever. And I think that his guitar soloing on the new album [2026’s Megadeth] really helped excite me too. The album’s got over 40 solos on it, I think — I think it was 45 or 47 solos on the album, and they’re all really involved, complex solos. So it’s a great guitar players’ record, and the songwriting part is very melodic, where I think a lot of people gravitated toward. It was Number One in 11 countries, so we did something right.”
The chemistry runs deep enough that Mustaine has compared it to one of the most celebrated lineups in the band’s history. Speaking with Chuck Armstrong of Loudwire Nights in August 2024, he reflected on how things shifted after Mäntysaari came aboard.
“Well, we are a band again. It doesn’t feel like me and some side players or some session guys. Not that it felt like that with any of the previous lineups, but that was one of the fears that I had. I feel like Kiko did us a really huge courtesy by helping us find Teemu because with Kiko needing to step down… I thought I was gonna finish my career out with Kiko, and when things came up with him, he couldn’t tour anymore because he needed to be home for his kids. So I see he’s touring again, which I’m happy that he’s still playing. But he had to go home. And when he did, he introduced us to Teemu. And it was an even closer connection between me and Teemu than Kiko and I had. We’ll [Kiko and I] always be friends, but this new relationship I have is — it harkens me back to the days when we had Marty Friedman in the band and the four of us actually felt like a band,” he said at the time.
Born in Tampere, Mäntysaari picked up the guitar at age 12. He joined Wintersun in 2004 and has also been part of Smackbound since 2015. In a June 2024 conversation with Sakis Fragos of Rock Hard Greece, Mustaine explained why the guitarist’s background made him such a strong fit.
“He knew more about the band and understands the metal backbone of so many of these songs more than some of the other people would understand it,” he said.
“When you’re a metal guy, I think you understand metal compositions more than somebody who, say for example, knows progressive rock like [former Megadeth guitarist] Chris Broderick does, or somebody who knows bossa nova, which Kiko does, or somebody that plays jazzy, like [former Megadeth guitarist] Glen Drover would play, maybe Al Pitrelli. These guys all have their strengths.”
Mustaine added a thought about the impact of being chosen by him.
“I’ve often thought, although I’ve never said it, I do believe that when somebody gets singled out by me, that’s pretty much it for them. They’ve been indoctrinated into the world of great guitar players, and from that moment on, their life will change.”
