Prior to his recent dismissal from Megadeth, longtime bassist David Ellefson had already recorded his parts for the legendary thrash band’s upcoming album. Now, frontman Dave Mustaine has revealed that Ellefson’s contributions to the new LP will be re-recorded by a new bassist.
Megadeth’s new album has been a long time coming. At first it appeared that it would arrive in 2019, but Mustaine’s battle with throat cancer that year put a halt on the recording process. While Mustaine eventually beat the cancer, the pandemic prevented the band from finishing and releasing the album in 2020.
While it remains unclear whether the new album will surface in 2021 or 2022, one thing that is clear is that Ellefson won’t appear on the band’s 16th full-length studio effort. On his own Gimme Radio program “The Dave Mustaine Show”, the metal icon offered the following update: “I just wanna thank you for all the kinds words and support as we get ready for this next tour and continue to hunt for a new bass player. We are making progress.”
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He continued, “The record’s being completed, and we’re gonna have someone coming in in a couple of weeks to replace the bass tracks that we had. Which should be relatively quick because the person we’re talking to is a stellar bass player. And hopefully this will be an ongoing thing after the recording. Or we will find someone prior to the recording that will be our permanent guy going forward.”
So, basically the band hopes whoever is tapped to re-record the bass tracks on the new album will become the new permanent bassist of Megadeth.
As it stands, the veteran metal act doesn’t have a ton of time to find a touring bassist, at the very least. Megadeth will kick off its co-headlining North American tour with Lamb of God on August 20th.
Ellefson was fired from Megadeth on May 24th after a video leaked of him engaging in an “embarrassing” online sexual encounter with a young woman surfaced online. While he denied that the woman was underage or that he had groomed her, the married bassist did admit to four or five “masturbating encounters” in his ongoing pursuit to press revenge pornography charges against the person who posted the video.
In firing Ellefson, Mustaine also cited an “already strained relationship” with Ellefson that dates back much further than this recent incident, as chronicled in this timeline of the pair’s past disagreements.
Hear Dave Mustaine talk about replacing David Ellefson’s bass parts on the new Megadeth album below, and pick up tickets to the band’s upcoming tour via Ticketmaster.