“It wasn’t really that I wanted to do my version,” Dave Mustaine has explained to Rolling Stone. “I think that we all wanted it to turn out a certain way, and for me, this was about something so much more than how a song turns out. It was about respect.”
That’s the crux of why the final Megadeth album, Megadeth — due January 23, 2026 via Mustaine’s Tradecraft imprint with Frontiers Label Group’s BLKIIBLK — will contain a new studio take on “Ride The Lightning,” the 1984 Metallica classic that still bears Mustaine’s fingerprints.
Speaking specifically about Metallica singer-guitarist James Hetfield, Mustaine added, “No one ever talks to me about that. One day he’s a singer, the next day he’s this fucking powerhouse, and I’ve always respected him as a guitar player. So I wanted to do something to close the circle on my career right now, since it started off with [Mustaine‘s band before Metallica] Panic and several of the songs that ended up in the Metallica repertoire, I wanted to do something that I felt would be a good song.”
That “close the circle” line matters. For four decades, the Megadeth/Metallica axis has been framed almost entirely in terms of rivalry rather than shared authorship. Here, Mustaine is nudging the narrative toward the latter: a reminder that he was there at ignition, that his DNA is in Ride The Lightning, the album, and that, playing “Ride The Lightning,” the song in 2026, it’s a lineage statement.
And he’s very clear about motive: “Our intentions were pure. I didn’t have any reason. I was going to say, ‘Oh, hey man, this thing that we’ve had for 40 years where you guys will never tour with me, me doing the song is going to change things.’ That wasn’t it at all. It was more about: This is my life going forward. I want to do things that are respectable. And I think doing something where we can pay honor to the guy that … I mean, I hate to say this, because it’s just so fucking arrogant, but the guitar playing in Metallica changed the world.”
That’s a veteran thrash architect saying: the way James and Lars played — and the way I played — actually mattered, and I want that on the record one more time.
In his separate video message, Mustaine laid it out even more plainly: “So on the new album we recorded Ride The Lightning, and the reason we did that was, obviously, it’s a song that I had a lot to do with writing. And James and I, when we were working on the song, it became clear to me, when James first started playing guitar, how good a guitar player he was. And I thought it would be really cool to close the circle to show respect, to play the songs that I’ve written with Metallica, and to honor our friendship, even though it’s been strained and ruined from emotions over the years when we were not necessarily friendly. But one thing I’ve always had is I’ve always had a tremendous respect for James‘s guitar playing and [Metallica drummer] Lars‘s [Ulrich] songwriting. So, it was cool to do this and add it to the record. We sped it up just a little teeny bit, and we kind of played around a little bit with the solo, and Teemu [Mäntysaari, Megadeth guitarist] and I both tossed it back and forth to each other. So, you might hear a little bit of some differences with the tempos and, of course, I sing differently from James too. But once again, it was about completing the circle and just showing what James and I, as guitar players, did to change the world.”
