“Super Collider,” however, offers an immediate change of pace. Anyone expecting Mustaine to follow the made-for-radio of those bands, however, would have been surprised by the galloping thrash attack of the album’s opening track, “Kingmaker.” The song was the first to feature a writing credit from bassist David Ellefson after his return to the band (he had departed following 2001’s The World Needs A Hero), so it’s perhaps fitting that its febrile pace harkens back to Megadeth’s earlier sound. Like Th1rt3en before it, Super Collider was produced by Johnny K, a man who knows a thing or two about commercial metal, with albums by the likes of Disturbed, Sevendust, and Staind to his credit. But then a polished sheen didn’t do any harm to Countdown To Extinction, which remains Megadeth’s most commercially successful album. The risk, then, was in potentially alienating purist fans.
“They are going to listen to that and think, I like that one song, and they are going to get the record and listen to the rest of the album and go, ‘Man, I love this style of music. “I think it also opens up a door,” he said. In fact, Mustaine saw his band as capable of drawing in fans who didn’t necessarily like metal, but would want to explore it on the strength of the songs he crafted for Super Collider.
They love the band and we showed them that… we write commercial metal pop songs that people can’t do anymore, because they’re either afraid, or they sound like they are hacking up a chicken bone they just don’t know how to do it.” Speaking of the album’s title track, he told Classic Rock Revisited, “It is the first track for our new record label, which is a major label. On Super Collider, the Megadeth frontman wanted to repay the faith his paymasters had invested in him and delivered a record with a more commercial edge.
But instead of allowing himself free reign to experiment and stretch the limits of the genre he helped define, Mustaine took on a different responsibility. The veteran thrashers had left the comfort of established record labels for Mustaine to set up his own imprint, Tradecraft Records with distribution through Universal Music Group. A new beginningįor Megadeth, however, their 14th album, Super Collider, marked a new beginning of sorts. Meanwhile, thrash had taken a deep dive into the underground and was given a dirty makeover by bands such as Black Breath and Trap Them. But, come the early 2010s, the technical precision emblematic of the genre had been adopted by more progressive-leaning bands like Mastodon and Gojira. Thrash metal in the traditional sense of the term showed a glimmer of life in the late 00s, thanks to the likes of Municipal Waste, Gamma Bomb, and Evile.