MEGADETH have issued the following announcement:

"Megadeth is confirmed to play the SWU Music & Arts Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Monday, November 14th. The full line-up for the festival is yet to be announced; tickets go on sale Monday, July 11th.

SWU (Starts With You, or "Começa com você", in Portuguese) is originally a Brazilian sustainability movement, which organised the rock music festival SWU Music & Arts Festival. The festival had its first edition in October 2010. Check the Killing Road for tour details here."

The band's South American tour schedule for November is now as follows:

November

9 - Buenos Aires, Argentina - Estadio Cubierto Malvinas
12 - Santiago, Chile - Maquinaria Festival, Club Hipico
14 - Sao Paulo, Brazil - SWU Music & Arts Festival

Mike Bax at Toronto-based Lithium Magazine recently caught up with Megadeth bassist David Ellefson. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

Bax: One of the things I think Megadeth has always been able to boast is a technical proficiency few other bands can touch. I'm sure most musicians would trip over some of the bars of music in Megadeth material. It must be challenging to reproduce some Megadeth material live on stage.

Dave: "Yeah, it is. It’s interesting because I grew up playing like that. I met Dave as he was first composing, and some of that stuff at first was some really slow and heavy riffs. Then the material got sped up very quickly and we seemed to start writing more and more progressively from there. I had a moment early on there where I was really glad I’d learned to play bass the way that I did, you know? Even in our original line-up with Gar Samuelson and Chris Poland, they originally came from a jazz-fusion-rock background kind of a MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRAmeets THE WHO sound… they were a little bit older than me and Dave, and they had some different life experiences behind them coming into the band. But when you fused me and Dave, the metal guys, with those two guys… we had a completely unique sound.

It was interesting because everyone around us had this much heavier (pauses) ‘metal’ sound… like an eighties metal sound. Sometimes I would be kind of envious of it, too. I would hear ANTHRAX records and they would have these great drum tones and these thick guitars, and obviously METALLICA records. Metallica records would always have great drum tone with a lot of bottom end and slick guitar tones. It took us several records to completely haul our tone in. We played our stuff differently than the other guys, you know? Out of The Big Four, every one of us has a very unique sound, and I think that’s so cool about what we are doing as The Big Four on tour now – we have such a unique individuality - each one of our styles, the way we write music and the way we play. These things are likely all elements we struggled with in the early days, trying to hone our sound, and it really became the basis of our individuality."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

A snippet of the new Megadeth song, 'Never Dead', is featured in the trailer below for the new NeverDead fantasy action game: