Former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson has opened up about his negative experience recording the band’s 2022 album ‘The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!’. He shared his candid thoughts during an appearance on The David Ellefson Show.
Ellefson described the recording process as particularly difficult. He expressed relief at being distanced from the project.
‘That was a brutal record,’ Ellefson said about the recording sessions for ‘The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!’. ‘I’m glad to be away from it, to be honest with you.’
The bassist elaborated on the challenges he faced during the album’s creation. The process spanned several years.
‘It was a terrible process,’ he continued. ‘It was five years in the making. Every song I wrote for it got taken off — every riff I added, every lyric I added. It was spiteful, it was vengeful and it was hateful. And it was not my record.’
Ellefson’s harsh assessment of the album’s creation process reflects the broader difficulties that surrounded the project during its extended development period.
Metal Express Radio reported that Ellefson did not actually perform bass on the final album. Steve Di Giorgio of Testament recorded the bass tracks after Ellefson was dismissed from the band in 2021 due to a personal scandal. The album’s production timeline was further complicated by external factors that created additional pressure on the band.
The recording process began in 2019 and took nearly three years to complete. Significant interruptions occurred along the way. Ultimate Metal noted that Dave Mustaine’s throat cancer diagnosis in June 2019 added considerable challenge to the album’s development. This forced the band to navigate both creative and health-related obstacles during production.
Despite Ellefson’s negative perspective on the collaborative process, other band members offered a different view of the songwriting experience. Blabbermouth revealed that drummer Dirk Verbeuren described the songwriting for the album as ‘very collaborative.’ The process involved contributions from himself, guitarist Kiko Loureiro, and Mustaine, who curated material from a large archive of riffs dating back to the 1980s.
The contrasting perspectives between Ellefson and his former bandmates highlight the internal tensions that existed during the album’s creation. This ultimately resulted in a project that divided those involved in its making.
