Megadeth’s new album, The Sick, The Dying And The Dead, is tentatively set to be released in the spring of 2022.
Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine revealed the timeline for the upcoming LP’s release in an interview with American Songwriter magazine. In the chat, which also covers Mustaine’s battle with cancer and his recent endorsement deal with Gibson, the songwriter said that The Sick, The Dying And The Dead title track is about the plague, but not solely centered around the current pandemic.
“The song itself was a historical journey of how the plague started and where it went, starting with rats on ships carrying the disease, coming ashore in Sicily,” Mustaine said.
According to Mustaine, the music for The Sick, The Dying And The Dead was assembled from riffs and music he has had archived for years, some as far back as his teens. “A lot of the riffs have been saved over time,” he said. “A brand new song can be made up of something I wrote when I was 15 or 55. If It’s a good riff, I’ll save it.”
Mustaine added that guitarist Kiko Loureiro and drummer Dirk Verbeuren were both involved in piecing together the songs on the album, which was recorded mostly in Nashville, with Loureiro working on his parts from his home in Finland.
Earlier this month, the band announced the release of a concert extravaganza multimedia event filmed in Argentina in 2005 to a stadium full of 25,000 passionate fans.
Due on November 26, A Night In Buenos Aires finds founder/vocalist Dave Mustaine leading his band of metal heroes—guitarist Glen Drover, drummer Shawn Drover, and bassist James MacDonough—through several of Megadeth’s most famous tracks, including “Symphony Of Destruction,” “Tornado Of Souls” and “Holy Wars…The Punishment Due,” plus tracks from the the album they released in 2005, “The System Has Failed.”