Dave Mustaine co-wrote 'Ride The Lightning' in 1983 and was out of METALLICA before anyone recorded it. Forty-three years later he put his own version of it on MEGADETH's farewell album — and, as he tells California Post, the band he wrote it with has yet to say a single word about it.
"We haven't heard from anybody from [the METALLICA] camp, whether they like it or not, and that's not why I did it," Mustaine said. "I did it to close the circle with us. We've done a lot of great things together, the three of us [James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Dave], and if this is the narrowing of the aperture on my career, I wanna go out on top."
The song arrives as a bonus track on 'Megadeth', the self-titled record billed as the band's last, and the decision came late: the album was about two-thirds finished when it was added. Mustaine is careful about what to call it. MEGADETH have always dropped a cover onto their records, but this, he argues, is a different animal — "it wasn't a cover, it was a version of a song that I wrote done by one of the other writers."
That framing set the bar. "I wanted to make it as good or better than the METALLICA version. So how do you do that? You gotta play it as good. You gotta sing it as good. You gotta make it as exciting or better." The answer was to sharpen everything: the tempo went up, the solo section was rebuilt, and the drums were pushed. Mustaine handed Dirk Verbeuren a free run at the last two of the four closing drum fills, and split the solo three ways with Teemu Mäntysaari — Mäntysaari takes the opening and closing thirds, Mustaine the middle — specifically so it would not read as Kirk Hammett copying him. He has no recording of his own original part to work from, he says, and has never found one.
There is one detail he keeps returning to. The spider chord, the two-fingers-and-two-fingers alternating shape he built his playing on, is in 'Ride The Lightning' as surely as it is in 'Wake Up Dead'. It is his fingerprint on someone else's most famous decade, and singing over it was harder than he expected: "I was trying to sing that song and some of it really pushed my vocal ability."
MEGADETH played the song live for the first time on 26 April 2026 at Movistar Arena in Bogotá.
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