Music

Megadeth’s self-titled farewell album rivals the band’s early thrash metal masterpieces. By John Kinsella.

Megadeth’s last album is a masterful swan song

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine (second from right) has called time on the band.

Credit: Ross Halfin

After 43 years of working against the Doomsday Clock making challenging metal music, the album Megadeth is heralded as Megadeth’s last. It’s released to coincide with their final world tour, with all the violence, sadness and even divinity of a swan song.

From early on, an obsession with closure has ridden with Megadeth. They remained one of the Big Four thrash metal bands until the end, but it came at a cost that lead singer Dave Mustaine is well aware of, no doubt processing it privately as much as through public discourse.

Megadeth has always been Dave Mustaine, carrying with it his angers, obsessions and contradictions, but this album is decisively marked by the input of new guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari. Even though the band is so often perceived as a one-man show, it has always relied on its cross-threading musicianship, focused through its trademark of thrash. Here Mäntysaari’s guitar work and tonality stand out.

Before plunging into the fretboard hyperactivity that is Mustaine accompanying his snarling apocalyptic vocals, it’s worth pondering how a hard left, pacifist and hyper queer-friendly listener such as myself can dig the whole Megadeth vibe in the first place.

Whatever Mustaine’s lyrics intimate about his relationship to a world that doesn’t comply with his world view, there’s enough ambiguity – especially as correlated to the driving, remorseless music – to burst out of any self-defined straitjacket. If in the poem “Song of Myself” Walt Whitman could write “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)”, there’s maybe leeway for me to say this of both myself as listener and Mustaine as maker. I hope so.

Watching the three single videos released ahead of the album, I found myself wishing I’d heard them before encountering the accompanying visuals. The Dave versus the World motif is overkill: he’s attacked by ghouls, restrained in chains, perhaps investigating the violence, desires and disturbing fantasies of metal fan culture. Somehow the visuals remove the ironies and genius of, say, the lyrics of the 1992 classic “Sweating Bullets” (“Hello me, meet the real me and my misfit’s way of life”) from my favourite Megadeth album, Countdown to Extinction. This album also contains the band’s musically most interesting track, “Symphony of Destruction”, which somehow almost seems to merge thrash sensibility with a single-voice strain of medieval “choral” music.

Unsurprisingly, Mustaine’s commentaries on the human propensity for annihilation remain in Megadeth, and even if at times they become tautological and self-parodic, there are still points to be made. It becomes clear that this farewell thrash aria is a concept album that rivals the band’s early masterpieces.

“Tipping Point” has a great set-up before full immersion, creating an alluring false start before plummeting into the darkness. It rouses and rattles, confronts with aggressive riposte – if you push, you will be pushed back. Death and vengeance is what I’ve personally spent my life working against, but this is a stage, a performance: “Today I may bleed but tonight you will die / Snatched in your sleep, in the blackest night / You buried the truth under layers of lies / There’s no return, now you’ve crossed the line”. It’s musically tight and compelling, and that adds to the disturbance.

“I Don’t Care” is a teenage/youth anthem of refusal to the point of “I don’t care if you live or die”. It’s a rock stalwart, but Mustaine’s persona-laden voice, the talk-sing snarl that marks so many of his signature tracks, is almost frightening here. There’s some beautiful contrapuntal guitar work, with driving bass, pinned drums. Axl Rose has his obsessions with maggots, but here Mustaine does something as profoundly disturbing with them.

“Hey God!” is a cross between an address, an epistle and an angry prayer. It expresses total belief, but the desire to close the distance between the divine and the self is almost painful. One can pity the insecurity of the addresser to their addressee. It’s beautiful with its staggered melody and almost narrative guitar work, the remorseless, driving beat that tries to control and ward off desperation – an invigorating song that’s maybe the truest to who Mustaine is and what Megadeth might actually be in its soul.

“Let There Be Shred” is Mustaine’s belated ars poetica. He literally means that shredding is liberation: “day I was born, guitar in my hand”. It’s frustration given an outlet, violence of thought earthed through crazed electrics: here guitars “scream with delight”. Strangely, the shredding in the track is quite muted. Even after the two-minute mark when it is let loose, it’s controlled, even pulled back, and never outruns the reliable, grounding bass. Maybe it’s a bit obvious, but the track works for me.

One of the markers of this album is the conscious separation of the parts: a production decision as much as a compositional choice. There are some intriguing shifts in “Puppet Parade” that verge on jarring but are smoothed enough to slide along with. One really gets the feel of Mäntysaari’s guitar as defining movement through this track. On the other hand, “Another Bad Day” feels like a filler track.

Drums take us into “Made To Kill”, with some nice, punchy but subtle alt-rhythm building to take us in a different direction. But the drums drive it – drums of war or anti-war. I live in hope.

The opening guitar of “Obey the Call” is somewhat “diminished”, a lament, until it’s suddenly not – those “burned out cities” chug into view with the “war machine”. Mustaine here is trying to say something beyond personal demons, beyond abstract representations of the ills of the world. What is Mustaine’s legacy of problematical political – allegedly non-political – observation? Is his thrash metal an intervention for peace? Some quite rock’n’roll wild guitar breaks late in the song – almost Slash-like in their drive – work amazingly well while still retaining the thrash ecology.

“I Am War” proffers the persona singing the mask of war like a Greek epic or tragedy: “I am war I am hurt and pain”. It’s strategic in its drama but it’s no bravura track as the vocal rides over its remorseless rhythm. It’s not musically vibrant, maybe even pedestrian. Into “The Last Note”, where voice-play, via an ominous vibrato narration, speaks to the lyrical “one last night before the silence falls”. Is this closure? Even the acoustic passage towards the end is a struggle with the devil, with aftermath as much as afterlife. Maybe Mustaine is free from eschatology now.

As a bonus track we have a Metallica cover, “Ride the Lightning”, co-written with members of Metallica from Mustaine’s early days with that band. It really does have the vibe of Metallica – or maybe Metallica has long retained the vibe of Mustaine. Interestingly, Mustaine’s vocals carry an almost James Hetfield inflection and tone. Some lovely guitar work shows both connections with
and departures from Metallica’s and Mustaine’s past.

I wouldn’t like to say this is my favourite track, tempting as it might be, because, although it has its flat parts, this album is actually one of Megadeth’s better later albums. But “Ride the Lightning” does capture the energy that made both early Metallica and early Megadeth so damned exciting, so able to escape their own moral and ethical contradictions.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 24, 2026 as "Final act".

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