Megadeth fans waited six years between Dystopia in 2016 and The Sick, the Dying… and the Dead! in 2022. This time around, the wait might be a little shorter. According to guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari, everyone in Megadeth is working on riff ideas with the overarching plan being to get a new record done in 2025.
"Right now everybody's gathering their own riff ideas, and then, at some point, we're gonna put them together and probably record in Nashville. And the plan is to get the next album done next year."
He continued: "I've got a bunch of stuff. What I do is I just pick up the guitar, I usually improvise and come up with ideas, then I record it on my phone, just the video. And I leave it there maybe for a week or two so I forget it. I wanna forget it, and then when I look back at it, then that maybe inspires me to look at the riff from a different perspective and maybe I get another idea from that. And then I record it down on my computer, laid out with the click track and do double-tracked guitars, and then save it in the folder of ideas.
"And what we've been talking about is that Dave often wants to work in this riff-based idea, not necessarily that everybody brings full songs, but you bring riffs and then we listen to them together and then we pick things that might go together well. And then that's how the songs start to actually form."
The next Megadeth record will be their first with Mäntysaari, who replaced guitarist Kiko Loureiro in 2023.
