Megadeth bassist and co-founder David Ellefson about the progress of the recording sessions for the band’s follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia album.
Ellefson said (watch full interview below): “Basic tracks are done. Overdubs now are continuing. I’m sure 2021 will see some new Megadeth music of some form — hopefully the whole album, because touring will open up and we can drop a record and the tour dates that we have rescheduled will all go forward as planned. That’s what we’re hoping. That’s about all I can say on it — just ’cause it’s not done yet, so it’s hard to talk about something that’s still in motion.”
During a last month’s appearance on “The Five Count,” Megadeth mainman Dave Mustaine provided an update on forthcoming album, saying: “I’m back to training and back to playing. And we’ve got, I think, probably one of the most ferocious records we’ve done since Rust In Peace. David Ellefson, he’s a pretty good barometer of things, and when he did his bass parts, he [went], ‘Man, my arm is killing me. I can’t believe this.’”
“We set out to do this last record because we’re all kind of getting a little older and we’re set in our ways and our families and stuff,” Mustaine continued. “One guy [drummer Dirk Verbeuren] lives in California, another guy [Mustaine] lives in Tennessee, another guy [Ellefson] lives in Arizona, and Kiko [Loureiro, guitar] lives in f*cking Finland. I mean, not ‘f*cking Finland,’ but in Finland. Excuse me for the language there. I’m a little bit bothered about having to fly my guitar player from Finland.
“Anyway, so we figured when we got together, what are we gonna do? ‘We’ve got one record left that we owe the record label. And let’s just go in there and write. So we wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And then I got the all-clear from the doctors, and today, I’m actually going over to start getting vocals down, because I’m getting ready to start singing.”
Megadeth‘s latest album, Dystopia, was released in 2016. Dystopia debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, with 48,000 copies sold in its first week, in addition to another 14,400 copies in its second week, when it fell to number 30 on the Billboard 200. Dystopia sold over 110,000 copies in the US fourteen weeks after its release. The album was a bigger seller than 2013’s Super Collider, which took 43 weeks to reach 80,000. The album sold 148,000 copies in the U.S. by December 2016, becoming the second biggest-selling heavy metal album released in 2016.