Megadeth - The Standard-Bearers of Thrash

Megadeth (Los Angeles, 1983 – Texas, 2002) are among the leading names of the thrash-metal scene. Megadeth is the band of Dave Mustaine (born in Arizona in 1961), a skilled and original guitarist, a founding member of Metallica, with whom he lived in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1982. While in 1983 Metallica released their debut album (one of the most important albums in the history of rock), "Kill 'Em All", with which they invented speed and thrash metal, Mustaine tried to get his revenge on his former bandmates by forming a group that, as a matter of principle, was meant to be uncompromising thrash metal and, again as a matter of principle, was meant to stand as the most effective rival to Metallica's runaway success. Megadeth did neither. As far as popularity goes, it's true, we're looking at one of the most famous (and best paid) metal bands of all time; but as we know, quality and quantity don't always go hand in hand. Distribution and promotion appear to have been the decisive factors.

If many metal bands of the era, such as Exodus, Accept, Metal Church or Venom and Mercyful Fate, had had the chance to get noticed, a very different fate might have awaited them. As for blond Mustaine, it must be said that the man is a guitarist, full stop. He does that job superbly; the pained, polished bowing-like attack of his guitar, thrash through and through, is recognizable among all others. Unfortunately he also tried his hand at songwriting, singing and, worse still, producing. Artistically (not economically, it's worth remembering) the result is an almost total disaster. Mustaine's voice is likewise recognizable among all others. All the more so in thrash or metal circles. In fact it's not manly, powerful or technical. Rather it's punk, adolescent, bent somewhere between whining and helplessness. Its merit, in this very sense, comes precisely from being so limited. He's one of the least capable and least gifted singers of all time; in fact, he isn't really a singer: which is why everything he utters comes across as credible and moving in its own poignant way. Like a kid trying to act tough, whose suffering and nervous energy only make you want to protect and reassure him. Mustaine's voice is like Axl Rose's (who, despite being far more gifted and hard rock, is at bottom also a punk) just an octave lower.

As for the songwriting, Mustaine desperately rips off others, stylistically contradicts himself right after stating something, and so on. Still, aside from a number of worthwhile ideas that are indeed present, this drifting sonic-noise magma, perpetually lost and disorienting, fixedly attacking and whip-like, unintelligible and acoustically ugly, constitutes — when it isn't boring — a brilliant and touching example of trash art, garbage. To be read as garbage, which is the key to the truth of the whole thing, represented as such. Mustaine would also insist on producing his own records, on one hand obstructing real producers who might have avoided certain wastes of material and effort, on the other hand hemming in his band's sound within an unresolved, breathless, expressively stunted framework — exemplified by Megadeth's first rhythm section, David Ellefson on bass and Gar Samuelson on drums, one of the most pitiful ever: the bassist, loyal to Mustaine and co-author of some tracks, would later improve a great deal, while the drums (a non-negligible part, because that's how Mustaine wanted it, without realizing he was doing the exact opposite of thrash in that respect), for as long as Samuelson was there, turn out not only nonexistent but also annoyingly and pointlessly hard rock.

Mustaine's game plan was to put everything on the guitars (on the other side we have Chris Poland). In this he wasn't wrong. Indeed Megadeth's guitars are always formidable and, while not as powerful and rock-solid as Metallica's (who in fact would abandon thrash for a heavy-speed sound), they make up an excellent and piercing expressive range for the whole thrash subgenre. However, with a deficient rhythm section (add to that, in the early years, a scandalous mix and recording job), the result is a lame or depowered thrash. Inconclusive, because it wounds, it complains, but it doesn't deliver a mortal blow. Perhaps, though, even if unintentionally (Megadeth are believed to be — and believed themselves to be — tough, even sonically), this handicap makes Megadeth's sound limbically unique on the scene: something that flickers in the air, unpleasantly, inconsistently, with no apparent purpose or aim. The most artistic thing about Megadeth (when I talk about Megadeth I mean the first four albums) is their almost total avoidance of melody and chorus: their best songs are a rant, a vortex with no center, from start to finish — moving in a straight line, not in circles. Given how things turned out post-'90, one wonders whether Mustaine was simply incapable of finding the right hook even before that, and hid behind the avant-garde as a shield for that inability. Megadeth's album covers, following the template set by Iron Maiden's, feature a monstrous character, somewhere between zombie and grim reaper, who from album to album embodies whatever theme-as-pretext is on offer, always within a childish, crude and naive apocalyptic scenario that ends up intimidating no one: now the world sells itself to the myth of nuclear war, now to that of war itself, now to that of market laws. On the surface, death is portrayed by Megadeth as a historical fact, all the more tragic for being tied to such circumstances; on the surface, again, Megadeth present socially themed, and in any case objective — that is, impersonal, non-sentimental — lyrics. In reality, setting aside all this external clowning, common since Black Sabbath to so many metal bands looking to sell their product to kids, Megadeth — and Mustaine — stir interest and engagement precisely through the feelings of sadness, loneliness, failure, powerlessness and incomprehension in which the individual human being finds themselves, regardless of historical or geographical context. In that sense, metal music can be taken seriously and does have existential content. Otherwise (and for many bands this is indeed the case) it's just disgusting, stupid, slavish horror theatrics for kids who grew up too much, and badly. The titles of Megadeth's early albums are phrases broken up by ellipses: this suspension, this lack of immediacy, this boredom already present in the approach to the phrase before you've even read it, exemplify Megadeth's inner and outer work, their messy completeness, their poor man's baroque, their ignorant verbosity, their childish rage and despair: like curse words coming out of a child's mouth, the coincidence of opposites that generates dissatisfaction and inconclusiveness (and what if that were the only truth?). While music is usually cathartic, Megadeth are the anti-catharsis par excellence. They are tribulation itself. They produce their masterpieces when that tribulation isn't self-satisfied. Nothingness, the absurd, contradiction, the lack of meaning and purpose in life, despair, loneliness and pain — more or less disguised in comic-book garb — are the pretexts for this kind of music, which, compared to hardcore (which shares the same themes), lives them out epically. Megadeth's major label would be Capitol (founded in Hollywood in 1942, it's the label of the Beatles and Frank Sinatra: since 1998, along with Virgin and Chrysalis, it's been part of the British giant EMI, which had taken it over in 1954).

Killing Is My Business … And Business Is Good! (1985), 27:27 minutes, 7 tracks. Producer: Karat Faye. Basically, all you need to do to understand everything about Megadeth is listen to this album: it is in fact their most representative and significant record (even if their best is Rust In Peace). All of Mustaine's punk fury is here (it's no accident the producer had worked with the Circle Jerks). And while the Century Media reissue (1999) raises doubts about an overly "clarifying" clean-up of the sound, that doesn't change the fact that this milestone is still razor-sharp today, a true keystone. Mustaine throws his whole heart and body into it, trying to get back at his old band. What comes out is more than a thrash album (Metallica) — it's a trash album (and this would remain Mustaine's constant: it's his punk nature). The brevity of the record, in the end, only serves to make it more incisive and memorable. "Mechanix" (4:21), written by Mustaine and Hetfield in 1982, is the most telling track for understanding how Mustaine worked within Metallica. One can never regret enough Mustaine's departure from Metallica (a bit like Barrett's departure from Pink Floyd!). It was Mustaine (despite being the "oldest" member) who gave the band a more punk, reckless and naive edge. Metallica (with Mustaine) recorded their first demo, "No Life 'Till Leather", in 1982, containing almost all the material that would be funneled the following year into their debut album ("Mechanix" is the song that would later become "The Four Horsemen": and in Megadeth's version it almost sounds like Social Distortion covering Metallica). "Kill 'em All" is the greatest metal album of all time, partly because it owes so much to Mustaine: because Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine are (together) the greatest metal songwriters of all time; the three of them unleash an alchemy that obviously cannot be preserved once one of the three is missing. It's no coincidence that Metallica, starting with their second album (essentially the first without Mustaine's fingerprints), would indeed become more themselves (forging the classic Metallica sound), but precisely for that reason would also become, inevitably, more conventional and, ultimately, less (if one can put it that way) compelling.

"Last Rites/Loved to Death" (4:38) shows traces, in some ideas and in its structure, of Alice Cooper. And that's no surprise, given Mustaine's trashy rhetoric. "Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good" (3:05) institutionalizes the Megadeth sound, of which it's the quintessence (it's like hearing Motorhead in a nursery school). "Skull Beneath the Skin" (3:46) is a showcase of Mustaine's ballistic guitar skills (Mustaine is at his most irresistible especially in his detuning and acidic playing). "Rattlehead" (3:42) shows (at a power-metal pace) how Megadeth set themselves apart from Metallica, mainly by: 1) ignoring the soft-loud dynamic; 2) consequently ignoring any melodic catharsis (Megadeth essentially don't write songs — they push forward through more or less improvised collage). "Chosen Ones" (2:54) brushes up against (in its own way, through a trashy thrash) hard rock. "Looking Down the Cross" (5:01) is a ballad taken in sips, a stylistic exercise taken in just as many sips, an evocation of Iron Maiden (no less!) in yet more sips: but, by the bottom of the bottle, it's the most sincere display of Mustaine's heart. No track is poorly done, no moment feels superfluous: even if, in the end, what remains is that sense of so much despair, so much rage and so much ugliness being represented without ever pointing toward some definitive meaning. And that makes the agony of this music all the more suffocating.

Peace Sells … But Who's Buying? (November 1986), 36 minutes, the usual 8 tracks. Producer: Randy Burns. "Wake Up Dead" (3:36) is a perverse, blurred, slow-motion thrash; the more granite-like riffs are systematically swallowed up by an overall dispersiveness and anti-purposefulness in the sound that reeks of perdition. Every effort is made to escape being an end in itself, without, unfortunately, succeeding. "The Conjuring" (5:00) continues along the line of twisting "Kill 'em All"'s programmed thrash into something perverse and pathological. The sound is at its limit, but it's a limit measured on the scale of powerlessness and ineffectiveness. Precisely because of these traits, Megadeth's message comes across even more dejected and unredeemed: chaotically and confusedly irreducible. It's an anti-geometry and anti-rationalism carried out with calculation and grammar: it's an anti-thrash made out of thrash and Black Sabbath. This is what carves out for Megadeth a particular, if minor, place in metal history. "Peace Sells … But Who's Buying?" (4:00) continues this suffering of never taking off: it's a dark hard rock, it's an animal suffering pointlessly because it neither dies nor manages to make itself heard. Only the guitars are metal, the drums stay in the background, the bass is atmospheric. The ending is breathtaking. "Devil's Island" (5:00) has an excellent, hallucinated and distorted opening. It carries on with machine-gun guitars. The chorus's vocal line cancels out the rest of the track's cathartic potential. As usual, the best parts are the beginning and the end (where Mustaine unleashes the ideas that, in his mind, justify the composition); as usual, the beginning is slow and the end fast. "Good Mourning/Black Friday" (6:40) is Megadeth's masterpiece. Especially the first part of the composition — on the surface just another pointless romantic ballad — vents and expresses all the desolation, the despondency, the abandonment that alone can sincerely sustain a Black-Sabbath-indebted thrash.

“Hey, I don’t feel so good/ Something’s not right/ Something’s over me/ What the fuck this”, sealed by Mustaine's one and only scream amid his usual muttering, make up the lines that, quite literally, offer up the whole Megadeth panorama. The second part of the track is Mustaine's most reckless thrash (and heavily indebted to Motorhead): finally the rhythm section pushes properly, finally the guitars level their sights and, without losing themselves in flourishes, let the machine gun rip. "Bad Omen" (4:00) features, right from the start, superb lashing guitar work, at times venomous, at times transcendent, with notable bass playing; as it goes on, the usual sense of unfocused forces returns. If it were deliberate it would be a great work of art, though the doubt remains that it might just be the product of ineptitude. "I Ain't Superstitious" (2:45) is a cover of an old Howlin' Wolf blues number; the result is a clownish, sneering thrash in which Mustaine shows off his bitter, disheartened sense of humor. Musically somewhere between Kiss and New York Dolls, it doesn't add anything interesting, except for its use of the thrash idiom to translate the most varied musical languages (even the blues). "My Last Words" (4:45) starts out as a rip-off of Metallica ballads, then moves into a charging Motorhead-style thrash, with Mustaine, particularly hoarse, recalling the voice of Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. Once again the best part is the ending, in a paroxysmal crescendo.

So Far, So Good .. So What !? (December 1987), 34 minutes, 8 tracks again. Two notable things about this album, which shape the rest of it: a producer with more freedom to operate (Paul Lani) and a drummer (Chuck Behler) who's better and more engaged than his predecessor. The result is a more powerful, more metal sound that nonetheless doesn't lose that messy, chaotic, punk-kid charm that defines the sound and is Mustaine's trademark. "Into the Lungs Of Hell" (3:25) immediately stands out as a powerful, fast instrumental, well-structured and deeply felt. Pathetic and epic, yet always tied back to the subject and his personal torments. Amid the guitar runs, one guitar echoes doom-era Black Sabbath, slowing the pace down to carve out the melody. "Set the World Afire" (5:45), which recalls the post-war atmosphere of the film of "The Wall", is, like all Megadeth tracks (and rightly so), mostly instrumental. When the vocals come in, nothing happens that's different from the thrash of "Kill 'em All" (obviously rendered much worse here). Recurring tempo changes give energy to a track that's ultimately made up of scales. "Anarchy In the U.K." (3:00), ten years after the Sex Pistols, speaks for itself. It should be added that American thrash and heavy metal bands, unlike their classic-metal (English) counterparts like Iron Maiden, have always acknowledged their debt to punk and hardcore: the covers bear witness to this, as do, in a kind of feedback loop, the metal covers done by hardcore bands. "Mary Jane" (4:20) starts off melodic, but far from rhetorical, showing great sincerity; more than a power ballad, it's an open-hearted confession, with all the lacerations of a devastated heart. The best track on the album, along with "Hook In Mouth". The violent ending is very hardcore. "512" (3:25) is yet another tough nut, entirely anti-melodic and anti-aesthetic.

Trash, however, in the long run, even when it elevates itself into ideology, becomes boring (the cinematic tricks, like background noise, especially so). "In My Darkest Hour" (6:00) is an effective and heartfelt slow-thrash. Mustaine always gives it his heart, it's just that it doesn't amount to much when his limitations become obvious. Instead, as here, when passion meets some actual expressive ability, the result is desolate, catastrophic and irredeemable scenes. The influence of non-thrash Metallica ("Ride the Lightning") is evident. As Mustaine often does, the track is split into two parts, and before it truly takes flight it takes its time: the first part is, as usual, at a medium, conversational pace; the second much faster and denser. "Liar" (3:15) carries on fairly incisively, but it's too tied to its era, and thus not a classic: the robotic chorus shows how that trendy (now dated) device was adopted for lack of genuine content. The ending is a highlight, literally cutting the track short (Dream Theater would do exactly the same thing in "Pull Me Under"). "Hook In Mouth" (5:00) stays steady within the epic of the undecided, the lukewarm, the desperate-because-powerless. In effect, it's the opposite of so much metal: not megalomania or will to power, but affliction and aphasia stemming from considerable artistic/expressive limits acting as dead weight. A group of technicians-performers, admirable too because they have real feelings and know how to communicate them through their instruments, left to their own devices without an actual score to play. All the more affecting, then, is this inner muzzle that clamps down right when the mic channels are open. Amid collage, small flashes of insight, half-formed ideas, hints, second-guessing, going in circles, forgetfulness, indecision, the track ranks among Megadeth's manifestos, a testament to their metallic fragility. Of Megadeth's first four albums, 50% of the material is throwaway, the rest worthwhile.

Rust In Peace (November 1990) is their absolute peak: it contains two superbly written tracks, and the others, at the very least, are played to perfection. Finally a production worthy of the band (Mike Clink, the fourth producer Mustaine had gone through in four albums: the man behind Guns N' Roses), a proper mix (Max Norman), and above all a band that actually sounds heavy: credit goes to guitarist Marty Friedman and especially drummer Nick Menza, a metal drummer, unlike the previous hard rock-leaning one. As for Mustaine's songwriting, it's the same old story: good flashes of inspiration, two or three tracks more compelling than usual, and the rest tedious filler. The bitterest irony is that Megadeth — veterans of thrash in theory and by reputation, but in practice inconclusive and lost epigones — reach the optimal state of their style, finally manage to express themselves, to make themselves heard (before, that alone, just in terms of the sound quality, was a feat!), precisely when metal — which, at the very least, owes them something for its own fossilization — is singing its swan song. In 1990, in fact, everything that needed to be said in metal had already been said.

Rust In Peace can be seen as an encyclopedic, final metal spark. The sound still sits between the hard rock and hardcore fusion invented in the early '80s by Social Distortion. Megadeth play thrash with a punk attitude, but in doing so they depower both, resulting in an overall trash-garbage effect that, when it hits the mark, expresses — crankily conveyed — disgust for life and the cosmos. Mustaine remains, more than an adolescent, the eternal child: with all the flaws and virtues that entails. The album (40 minutes, 9 tracks) opens with "Holy Wars … The Punishment Due" (6:34), "Kill 'em All"-style thrash (here too Mustaine's vocals ape Hetfield), half instrumental, half sung. A fast track, whipped along by Friedman's sobbing guitar lines and Mustaine's melodic sense, which finds room to breathe within the structure of a fully and sincerely successful song. One of the high points of the Megadeth style. Technically the band outdoes itself: Menza's drumming rightly dominates, almost brushing up against power metal by the end. "Hangar 18" (5:10) is another peak. It starts off sublimely: it starts like the best Social Distortion (the "Moral Threat" era), it starts as hardcore only in terms of speed, because it breathes like hard-rock. It carries on convincingly and movingly: the guitar parts are, as usual, emphasized and polished to the max without ever feeling artificial or contrived. These are guitars that sing, guitars that moan, not ones that merely (as one hears far too often) run through scales. Halfway through the track the tempo shifts, and here Megadeth turn to power, technically almost epic/progressive; indeed, unexpectedly for old-school thrashers, here one can hear the transition from '80s power metal to the more technical, new-age power metal of the '90s being conceived. The second half of this track would be copied wholesale by the whole swarm of wretched progressive-metal bands of the '90s, Dream Theater chief among them. Reconciling punk, hard-rock, progressive and thrash can only be a credit to Megadeth. "Take No Prisoners" (3:20) is a choral thrash lifted wholesale from Anthrax (especially, and above all, in the rhythm section), who were doing such things almost a decade earlier. All well played, but all pointless. "Five Magics" (5:40) is, in the bass, totally Metallica, then the guitars find their own, peculiar language, the one invented by Mustaine. The verbose lesson of "And Justice for All" becomes too blatant and the track fails to convince. The ending even copies "Master of Puppets" outright. "Poison Was the Cure" (3:00) has the same problems as the previous track and as this Megadeth album in general: superbly performed, but a shame it's such an obvious rip-off — this time of Motorhead's rock'n'roll. "Lucretia" (4:00): an irresistible witchy cackle opens it; then the saga of "Mary Jane" continues (this time as a tragicomic disaster); and Friedman's wildly original stuttering riff alone is enough to make the track a classic. "Tornado of Souls" (5:20): we're back to "Kill 'em All" territory again; but with sincerity and passion; add to that an impeccable performance, a fury that's now hardcore, now hard-rock (Axl Rose more than ever), and the track (except for the predictability, unusual for Megadeth, of certain guitar riffs) comes across as convincing. "Dawn Patrol" (1:50) is an original spoken-death piece thrown in as filler, but, between the dub-bass, funk-drums and death-vocals, with that hickey-like closing line, it ends up, alongside "Lucretia" and the two opening tracks, the best piece on the record. "Rust In Peace … Polaris" (5:00) is pure Megadeth (above all, pure Mustaine), and could have fit on "Peace Sells". Very sincere. Very pointless.

Countdown To Extinction (Capitol, 1992), Youthanasia (Capitol, 1994), Cryptic Writings (Capitol, 1997), Risk (Capitol, 1999), The World Needs A Hero (Sanctuary, 2001), are five pointless attempts that beg for help, now from hard rock, now from industrial, now from power-metal, in order to give some value to an artist, Mustaine, who, from a compositional standpoint, has none. Mustaine's misfortune is the same as Clapton's or Santana's: great guitarists, and in that sense artists, but utterly powerless and ridiculous without someone guiding them. People like that should only play covers or other people's songs. Alone, and finally sidelined even by the fans (who really gave him far too much over 20 years of career), Mustaine disbanded Megadeth in April 2002.

In 2004 the pathetic reunion of the band and the album The System Has Failed, complete with the ridiculous video for "Die Dead Enough", amounted to the classic missed opportunity to just keep quiet.

Their 2007 album, United Abominations, marked their debut for Roadrunner, but it didn't reverse the decline.

Endgame (2009) instead attempts to seal their third coming of age. With the lineup settled into a classic quartet recalling, in a lesser key, the one from the late '80s and early '90s (with a dominant lead guitarist, Chris Broderick, ex-Nevermore, and a technical, propulsive drummer, Shawn Drover, in the mold of the revered Friedman and Menza), Mustaine imposed yet another shift on the band, one that coincides with a renewed appreciation for the more abrasive sounds of their back catalogue.

The instrumental intro "Dialectic Chaos" leaves no doubt about the intentions here: speed, impact, no-frills riffs and two guitars let loose chasing each other through breathless solos. "This Day We Fight" is a typical piercing, rock-solid, jarring Megadeth thrash-core number, devoid of melody. Mustaine's voice is raspy, muttering and less sharp than on the records that really matter. Not that one could ever say singing was their strong suit anyway. "44 Minutes" is more epic and melodic, with a punchy riff and a chorus worthy of the name. "1,320", with its thunderous shifts, is a fast-and-furious, videogame-like dash that recalls "Countdown To Extinction". "Bite The Hand" chews on a few timid nu-metal hints. "Bodies" is perhaps the most successful track, with its open, varied structure. Then in the second half the pace drops: "The Hardest Part Of Letting Go Sealed" is a flabby, over-belted power ballad; "Endgame", with its war-veteran, anti-Bush tones, is less vicious than it wants you to believe; a bit better is "Head Crusher", a shard bordering on metalcore, and the prototypical metal charge of "How The Story Ends".

Endgame is a dignified record, without particular merits but also without any unbecoming lapses in style, which, we believe, will satisfy longtime fans and nostalgics of the most classic thrash/speed pedigree.

In January 2016 Megadeth return with their fifteenth studio album, in a renewed lineup where Mustaine and Ellefson are the only original members left; for the occasion, the role of "second guitar" and drummer are entrusted respectively to Kiko Loureiro, already active in Brazilian power metallers Angra, and to Chris Adler, on loan from thrashers Lamb Of God.

The new Megadeth's metal is a very "technical" thrash, marked by surgical precision and complexity; at the same time it's a work defined by a pronounced visceral quality, direct. Dystopia undoubtedly sounds familiar, an album where Megadeth-sound-like-Megadeth, but with a thirty-year career behind them, that's hardly surprising. Less predictable are the moments where they hit the gas and return to more aggressive sounds, those of "Rust In Peace" so to speak, backed by a crystalline yet powerful production, at times "modern".

The opener "The Threat Is Real" drops us into a Nuovi Barbari-like atmosphere: between tight riffs and fast tempo changes, there's room for pleasant deja-vu moments (the title track, "Post American World"), groovier tracks like "Bullet To The Brain" and "The Emperor", and a pseudo-ballad ("Poisonous Shadows"). The album closes with a cover of Fear, "Foreign Policy", with controversial lyrics, in line with Mustaine's own writing. A quality comeback for a band of veterans proving they still have plenty of tricks up their sleeve.

After having rid himself of friend/enemy David Ellefson, Mustaine returns in 2022 with his sixteenth studio album. The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! is a good album of fast, technical thrash metal, with more than one nod to the old masterpieces, first and foremost the usual Rust In Peace, the true benchmark for Megadeth's entire career, better than most of what's been released by bands now boasting a forty-year career. The most commendable quality is that, even today, Mustaine's music is still the offspring of his youthful vision of metal, not having become overly bourgeois (at least less so than others) and not having been reduced to mere craft.

There's still a soul in Mustaine's songs, perhaps the soul of a teenage nerd, but an authentic and consistent one nonetheless. That's proven by the title track, a speed/thrash song in classic Megadeth style, the machine-gun riff of "Life In Hell" and "Night Stalker", which at times recalls the days of "Holy Wars". The theme of war is still ever-present and the way of telling it is still the same, an obsessive bombardment much closer to a comic book than to a genuine singer-songwriter's testimony.

Between filler tracks, a few standout songs ("Sacrifice") and some odd, almost industrial-metal choices ("Soldier On!" could almost pass for a Death SS album track) and even a cover of Dead Kennedys ("Police Truck") and of Sammy Hagar (the hard rock of "This Planet's On Fire"), the album could have closed with a promise of a future return, complete with the usual lightning-fast metal riff ("We'll Be Back").

Contributions by Simone Coacci ("Endgame"), Lorenzo Pagani ("Dystopia"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google