Megadeth, “TheSick, The Dying… and the Dead!”

For roughly 40 years thrash metal in the United States has been dominated by the Big Four: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth. Of them, Megadeth is the last to remain purely a thrash metal band; Metallica famously went in a more mainstream direction in 1991, Anthrax took on alt-rock in 1993 and Slayer disbanded in 2019.

The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! is the first Megadeth album since it became the last pure thrash metal band standing and, perhaps because of this or perhaps coincidentally, in many ways it’s a throwback to its earliest work. Even the album title is a callback with an ellipsis and a punctuation mark like its first three albums; Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!, Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?, and So Far, So Good… So What!.

As it turns out, that’s a good thing. There’s a reason Megadeth has been around this long, and the genre has enough staying power that there was a revival about a decade ago. Some of the album’s purest thrash songs are highlights. “Sacrifice,” for example, could fit in anywhere in the band’s discography aside from the slightly lower register of frontman (and last original member) Dave Mustaine’s vocals. “Killing Time” is also a solid throwback with a killer guitar solo.

There are also some slower-paced songs, which have been the thrash version of a power ballad since the beginning. The band shows a surprising amount of musical evolution. “Mission to Mars” is a narrative song in the same spiritual line as David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” told from the perspective of an astronaut on his way to the red planet. It’s not Bowie and it’s certainly not Elton, plus the narrator finds an abandoned spacecraft and an alien attack that makes it a bit more sci-fi, but it’s pleasantly unexpected.

While Megadeth isn’t known for being especially heavy, “Dogs of Chernobyl” breaks that trend by doing heavy as well as any thrash metal band, including Metallica. It blends the usual fast, squealing guitar with a plodding, heavy beat seamlessly.

The album’s highlight; though, is “Night Stalkers.” Though it’s only for part of the song, guest vocalist Ice-T adds a dimension the rest of the album, and most modern albums, have lacked. Though best known as a rapper and actor, Ice-T has been frontman of the excellent heavy metal band Body Count since 1990. It’s almost as if being side by side with another metal vocalist makes Mustaine step up his game, because it’s easily his best vocal performance on the album.

What brings the album down is that it’s thematically flat. Thrash metal has always had roots in social and political causes from its punk rock influences, and in shock-value occult references from its heavy metal influences. Metallica has released countless songs about America’s treatment of veterans, for example. Slayer splits its time between songs about serial killers and the devil with anti-racist and anti-fascist sentiments. The genre itself was part of the backlash against Reagan-era conservatism, after all.

‘The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! doesn’t touch on any of that, however. Mustaine stopped playing any songs about darkness or the occult, even from his back catalog, since he became a born again Christian. His hard rightward political shift since the mid ’00s precludes any of the genre’s activist roots. That means the major recurring theme is the glorification of soldiers and war, with the rest being either fiction or thematically neutral. The good news is that it’s an improvement from the band’s 2009 album, Endgame, which Mustaine has said was inspired by a conspiracy-laden movie by Alex Jones to educate people on Jones’ theories of a secret cabal instituting a new world order.

Overall, if you’re willing to look past the one-dimensional lyrics and themes, The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! will scratch that thrash metal itch. It’s a very well-executed throwback by one of the bands the album throws back to, hitting all the right notes and evoking all the right nostalgia.

Follow editor Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.