Megadeth’s bassist David Ellefson revealed on the The Metal Voice podcast that the band has postponed recording the new album due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The original plan was to hit the studio in Nashville after their Hell & Heaven Fest appearance but due to the lockdown and people’s safety, it has been postponed.
“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. We ended up having to cancel out of the ‘Hell & Heaven Fest‘ in Mexico City, which I think was March 15th. And right after that, we 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 also discussed the sound of the record and described it has “very heavy.” He also mentioned that the album had more of a cohesive feel between band members.
“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.”
Watch the full episode below!
