Megadeth’s New Album Is Ready to Be Recorded, but Coronavirus

We already knew that Megadeth were planning to record a new album before the start of their big co-headlining tour with Lamb of God, which is scheduled to kick off June 12. So it’s not surprising to learn that the album is written and ready to be recorded.

Unfortunately, it’s also not surprising to learn that the band can’t record the album yet, because — you guessed it! — the social distancing that has become necessary as a result of the goddamn motherfucking coronavirus means all of the band’s members and crew can’t travel to, or convene in, the studio.

Bassist David Ellefson tells The Metal Voice:

“We’ve been working on it, and it’s written, and it’s ready to be recorded. In fact, we were gonna start recording it toward the end of March. But, of course, all of this happened… [W]e were gonna go to Nashville and get started cutting tracks, but with everything shutting down like this, we obviously have to put health matters for us… And it isn’t just the four of us — you go in the studio, and now you’ve got a whole staff of people in studios and carting services and all kinds of other services that go along with making records. Everybody’s locked down right now. So once the lockdown lifts and it’s safe to go back to — I hate to say ‘normal life,’ but it’s safe to basically engage in that again, we will absolutely be ready to rock.”

Ellefson went on to describe the material the band has written for the album, and explain, to a degree, why the band members can’t just record their parts remotely the way some many artists do in this glorious era of at-home recording technology:

“I think it’s a great record. It’s very heavy. There’s a lot of really fast thrashing stuff. And a lot of it is that the vibe is — it feels very cohesive between the four of us. We worked on a lot of it together, the four of us. Everybody works at home, and we’d throw some ideas into a folder and we’d kind of start working on that. But we spent a lot of time last summer — before we had to shut down for Dave’s [Mustaine, guitar/vocals] throat cancer treatments — we spent a couple of months together working on it. And that was great, because that adds a whole different angle, a different skew, if you will, to the flavor of the record. That’s how we used to make all the early albums — we’d all live together in Los Angeles and we’d rehearse five, six days a week and then we’d be in the studio together working on it. And over the years, people live in different locations, and, of course, we have a lot of availability of digital technology, so we can kind of send things around to keep collaborating even in downtime like this. But I think there’s a real feeling on this record that we want this to be a band record. We don’t want this to be something where we just come in and sort of plug into the computer and record our parts and go home. And the recording process is what it is, but I think for the writing and this pre-production phase that we’ve been in, we have really put the time in as a band, and I think it’s gonna really show on the album.”

So, in other words, who the heck knows when this thing will get recorded, but Ellefson is optimistic that it will be of the highest possible quality when it finally does.

You can check out the entire interview below.

Semi-related: let’s get a pool going as whether or not the is MegaLoG tour will be postponed or not. I’m guessing it will. Anyone disagree?

[via]