Nearly one year old, Megadeth's new album Dystopia continued mainman Dave Mustaine's vision of precise speed metal anarchy! The album was recorded in Nashville, TN, and mixed by Josh Wilbur (Lamb Of God, Gojira, Avenged Sevenfold). The rest of the Megadeth lineup is comprised of new member Kiko Loureiro (formerly of Angra), David Ellefson on bass, and drummer Chris Adler, who took time away from Lamb Of God to record Dystopia.

About the bleak picture Mustaine paints of this world he told BraveWords: "Yeah, this would be different if this was all reality, and if everything I said was true, with no imagination or no fiction in my writing. I mean, if everything I said was true, there would be Dragons and Wyverns like there are in 'Five Magics'. I look at it like this: for me, there are two ways to look at this world - the optimist way, where it's a good place with some bad people; then there is the pessimist way - a bad place with a few good people. Of the two, I'm an optimist. There are a lot of good people here, and obviously there are a lot of bad people here too. For the most part, many of those bad people can be steered back the right way - I know I was. I was so miserable in my life growing up, and getting in Megadeth helped. Of course, I thought it was going the right direction in the Panic and Megadeth days, but it was until that feeling of family until I really started to heal. Coming from a broken family really does fuck with your head when you are a kid. Having that sense of belonging is essential. I think that's why nowadays a lot of kids have trouble - when they are at home and not getting what they need or the understanding and nurturing and stuff. I mean, how cool can your parents actually really be? Even as Dave Mustaine, I'm still that dorky dad when it comes down to going to school functions (laughs). So, I think that's one of the cool things with us, as we are always trying to be understanding with where we are coming from with the lyrics. We don't want people to take our word as gospel, we are not telling you how it is, we are saying just check it out.”

Read more here.

In his 7.5/10 review David Perri wrote:

Maybe it's time that we collectively realize something about Megadeth: while the band's peak was undeniably Rust In Peace (1990) and Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? (1986), the group's legacy is probably not going to be those records. Through too many members and through numerous label changes, it's become incrementally clear that Rust and Peace Sells are only anomalies in Dave Mustaine's catalogue, and not representative of Megadeth in its totality. Maybe it's finally time to stop expecting return-to-forms in those albums’ mirror image, though the Megadeth pre-release hype always hints that, THIS time, we'll be getting what we’ve been waiting the better part of two decades for.  

Which isn’t to say Dystopia - Megadeth’s 15th full-length - is a bad record. Far from it, in fact. But it’s very much in line with the Megadeth we’ve known since The World Needs A Hero was released 15 (!) years ago. Since that time, some of you (Greg Pratt) have heard me go on, for too long on many occasions, about how if you put all the highlights from the post-World Needs A Hero records on a single album, you’d have one hell of a statement. But, because of too many serviceable but ultimately unmemorable songs on those records, they’re kind of lost in the fog.  The System Has Failed, United Abominations, Endgame, Th1rt3en… you’d be lying if you told someone you could tell them apart, or remember them other than a key song here or there. Which undermines the fact that there’s some great material in those forlorn places.

Which is essentially the story within the story on Dystopia. The highlights here, and there are several, could easily be in the top tier of that aforementioned highlight reel.

Read the entire review here.