dave mustaine
Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has confirmed he’s preparing his debut solo album, clarifying that the project is set to be a genre-shifting creation.
Hammett confirmed the record while speaking to Rolling Stone ahead of the release of the book, The Collection: Kirk Hammett, which shows off his large collection of vintage guitars. The discussion featured a number of revelations, including word that Hammett was finally working on a full-length solo record.
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“I’m just actively getting ideas together for my [first] solo album,” Hammett explained. “I guess the best way to describe it is it’s gonna be a fusion of all sorts of styles…. All of a sudden I’m writing classical progressions, and all of a sudden I’m writing more heavy stuff and all of a sudden I’m writing like a funk thing….
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“There will be vocals because the songs that I wrote scream for vocals this time around,” he adds. “So I’m like, okay, who’s gonna be doing the vocals? I don’t know. I hope I’m not—I already have too much to do on stage… I have an instrumental piece that to me sounds like it’s 2000 years old called ‘The Mysterion.’ It’s based on all this stuff that I’ve been reading, the ancient Greek texts, and it’s amazing to me because I wouldn’t have had this instrumental if I didn’t start reading these ancient texts.”
Hammett, who has been the guitarist of Metallica since the departure of Dave Mustaine in 1983, first issued a solo release in 2022 by way of the Portals EP. Described as “a collection of gateways to myriad musical and psychic destinations,” the four-track, 27-minute instrumental work showed off a new side of Hammett, while still finding itself rooted in the work he had risen to fame with as part of Metallica.
Almost one year later to the day, Metallica released their eleventh studio album, 72 Seasons, which became their first not to peak at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since 1988’s …And Justice for All. Despite their ongoing touring schedule, Hammett told Rolling Stone he’s already in the process of writing riffs for the band’s next album as well.
“I have 767 new ones for the next album,” he explained. It is such a nightmare going through this stuff, too. And I’m the one responsible for all of it and I can’t do it…. I don’t foresee us starting the next album for at least another year because we’re still finishing the 72 Seasons tour.
“Once we fully finish this and go to all the outlying places like Asia and Australia and New Zealand, I think we’re gonna take a little bit of a break, not too much of one, and then we’re gonna get right back into it.”
Metallica’s current touring schedule wraps up following their performance in Auckland, New Zealand on Nov. 19.
Thirty years ago, when Megadeth was the first musical artist ever to participate in a “chat room” on its “website” on the “Internet,” an anonymous troll posted a single word over and over, to the point of driving Dave Mustaine crazy. “I looked at it like, ‘How do I get rid of this thing?’” the metal band’s frontman and guitarist tells Billboard. “I still, to this day, don’t know who the guy was. There was no one else, so this guy saw that as an opportunity.”
What was the word?
“S—,” Mustaine recalls.
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Such were the travails of the virtual city of Megadeth, Arizona, in October 1994. As envisioned by Robin Bechtel — then sales director for Megadeth’s label, Capitol Records — Megadeth, Arizona, based on the location of the band’s new studio in Phoenix, was the concept for the first-ever artist website. In addition to the chat room, called the Megadiner, the site featured an art-and-digital-postcard repository, Vic’s Cactus Hut and Souvenir Shop, a newspaper titled Horrorscopes and links to videos and online-radio tracks. It was designed to promote Megadeth’s album Youthanasia, but its legacy ultimately became to “onboard people onto the World Wide Web,” according to Bechtel, today an angel investor in Uber, Everlane and others, “which is wild to think about.”
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Bechtel, a digital music pioneer who later worked at Warner, first envisioned the Megadeth concept while touring a multimedia studio in Los Angeles and learning about the use of Macromedia software in videos and websites. She signed up for the dial-up service CompuServe and set up a modem at her apartment. At Capitol, she wrote a proposal for the Megadeth website and requested a $30,000 budget. Her boss, Lou Mann, senior vp of sales and field marketing, agreed, even if other Capitol employees had no idea what she was talking about. Earlier that year, Tim Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and it was catching on among tech insiders and early adopters, but the idea would take years to spread to music fans — and record executives.
“I wrote a proposal. It’s hysterical — it’s me trying to explain what a website would be,” Bechtel recalls. “We had a Megadeth record coming out. I was invited to the meeting. Nobody knew what the Internet was. Everyone was focused on who was going to shoot the album cover, and would the cover make the poster and would the cover and poster be in the record stores.”
It was the first time among many, during Bechtel’s label career, that she would be told the Internet was a fad.
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“She made a big presentation about it, and there were maybe 10 people in the room. Nine of the people didn’t even understand what she was talking about: ‘What is this fake city?’” recalls Mann, now CEO of StageIt, which broadcasts live performances online. “There were a lot of traditionalists in our industry. You play it on the radio, you get it in the stores. But this was a new way of marketing. It was tough. They were dubious and it affected other things.”
Mann believes the industry skepticism of Megadeth, Arizona, represented a broader overall skepticism of new technology threatening music’s business model, largely built on marketing and selling CDs. This attitude, within labels, lingered through the late ’90s. For example, Capitol released a Duran Duran single online, and old-school record retailers did not react kindly. Later, when Napster popped up and threatened the business model of selling CDs in stores, piracy-fearing label execs neglected an opportunity to create a new business model. “It was a whole industry education that was taking place,” Mann recalls. “Nobody wanted it, because it challenged the protocol. On the other hand, that was the beauty of it.”
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Megadeth, Arizona, launched with grey backgrounds and Times Roman typefaces — “That’s how limited it was back then,” Bechtel says. And while the website may not have moved the needle on Youthanasia sales, it generated copious attention in newspapers and magazines. “Once Megadeth got involved, it took off,” she adds. “The band was always in there logging into the Megadiner. They saw it, I think, as modern-day tape-trading. They totally got it.”
Soon other artists were demanding websites, too. Mustaine heard KISS‘ Gene Simmons had said, “I want a website just like Mustaine’s,” and contacted the band’s manager to confirm the rumor. An hour later, he received a call from Simmons himself. “There was nothing like this before,” Mustaine says. “It’s such an unfathomable concept: There was no Internet back then.”
Mustaine, who is once again planning to release a new Megadeth album, today is the focal point of an official website, megadeth.com, which contains standard features like tour dates, videos, T-shirt-selling web stores and band-member biographies. Plus social media, of course. But he retains a fondness for the denizens of Megadeth, Arizona, “If you go to Megadeth concerts and find somebody that was a member of the Megadiner,” he says, “that’s real street cred.”
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