Dave Mustaine spoke about the end of Megadeth and what comes after it at an event in New York this month, describing the farewell tour as bittersweet and saying he has no fixed plan for what follows.
He appeared at the Kaufman Music Center on September 8 in conversation with Kory Grow of Rolling Stone, marking the publication of his memoir “In My Darkest Hour” the same day.
Asked how he is handling the tour, he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “It’s bittersweet. It doesn’t feel great, I can tell you that much. There’s times when we take the stairs in the back, and walking up the stairs, I keep saying the same thing I’ve said every night when I go up the stairs. And it’s like a private thing. I just say, ‘It’s your stage.’ And I go up there and I do my job. And that’s it. I go out and do my job, the gift that God’s given me.”
On what retirement looks like: “Well, I’m sure I’m gonna be involved in music to some degree, whether it’s as simple as just listening to it or making it. I don’t know. I’m hoping God’s gonna heal me and there’s gonna be some kind of new technology that they’ll say, ‘Hey, guess what? When you put your hand in this glove and then — boom — your hand’s given back to you nice and shiny and new.’ That would be pretty b**chin’, I think. But I’m just gonna keep trying to be hopeful and play the best I can until then.”
The hand he refers to is not incidental to the farewell. It is the reason for it.
Mustaine has Dupuytren’s contracture, in which tissue beneath the skin of the palm thickens and gradually pulls one or more fingers towards it. He has called it his Viking hand, a reference to the condition’s prevalence in northern European populations. The Mayo Clinic notes there is no cure, and that treatment can relieve symptoms and slow progression rather than reverse it.
He disclosed the diagnosis in December 2025, when Megadeth announced a final album and tour, and has been consistent since about the connection.
“I have an injury to my hand here,” he told Chile’s La Tercera. “And it’s gonna get worse so that it eventually pulls my finger like this, and I won’t be able to play like that.”
He has also described arthritis in his fingertips, bulging discs and a previous spinal fusion.
Asked when he decided to wind the band down, Mustaine told Spain’s “MariskalRockTV” there had been no decision as such.
“No. No, ’cause I just brought it up. I didn’t decide,” he said. “We were working in the studio, and it just had been a really difficult few weeks. We were trying to get everything done… we had a bunch of deadlines we ran up against, and my hands were hurting really bad.”
The hope he expresses for a cure sits alongside a decision he has already made about treatment, and it is a calculated one.
“If I try it now and I’m 95 percent, and the surgery sets me back, that would’ve been a bad decision,” he added. “If I wait until my hands are really causing a problem and I try it and it doesn’t work, then at least I’ve toured everywhere and said farewell properly.”
In other words, surgery comes after the tour, not before it.
Asked whether unreleased Megadeth material exists, Mustaine said there is some, but was vague about what happens to it.
“There’s bits and parts, pieces and little stuff like that. There’s a couple of completed songs from the last album with James [LoMenzo] and Teemu [Mäntysaari] and Dirk [Verbeuren] that we did not release yet. I think those were supposed to be bonus tracks for the label or something. I’m not sure. [So there may be] a song or something [that could see the light of day]. But I don’t know.”
Megadeth‘s self-titled seventeenth album was released on January 23 and became the band’s first to enter the Billboard 200 at number one. The “This Was Our Life” farewell tour opened on February 15 in Victoria, British Columbia, and Mustaine told Kerrang! it is likely to run three to five years.
“In My Darkest Hour“, written with Joe Layden, was published on September 8 in the US through Da Capo, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, and reaches the UK on September 24 through Constable.
Mustaine, who turned 65 last week, formed Megadeth in 1983.
