The freshness and vitality in Dystopia’s sound — like that of all Megadeth’s best work over the years — derives not just from the sheer force and velocity of the band’s playing, or the anguish and anger in Mustaine’s vocals, but from the melodies Megadeth is careful to incorporate into their songs. This is one way a band stays vital into their twilight — with songs patiently and expertly built to never wear out.

Crucial to Mustaine’s musical development was the influence of his sisters. “There were different generations,” he tells me in an interview by phone.

“There’s 18 years between my oldest sister and me. So their husbands would listen to really cool shit from the ‘50s and ‘60s. And I have a sister who’s three years older than me, so I was exposed to the stuff she liked: a lot of Motown, a lot of stuff like Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Frankie Valli, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, all kinds of really cool stuff, Herman’s Hermits, and really weird, weird bands from the ‘60s, the Rascals, the Hollies. And all that stuff that was in the ‘70s and shit, too,” he adds.

He took this foundation and built on it as he matured. “When the British Invasion happened,” he says, “with Led Zeppelin and the Who, that really rocked my world, and it wasn’t long before I discovered AC/DC, Kiss, other bands that really started to craft my musical songwriting. My guitar playing took a complete turn once the new wave of British heavy metal came out, because it was all about the riff. And because I had had that weaning…with playing guitar with my sister, who’s a piano player — we would play the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Elton John — [I learned] a lot about pop structures. But I loved the metal energy. So I think it’s the prism I see things through.”

Credit also has to be given to the other musicians in the band, beginning with Dave Ellefson, the first lasting member of Megadeth whom Mustaine recruited, and who has been a part of the band — with one acrimoniously litigious interruption — all the way through Dystopia.

When Mustaine returned to California and set about “building the perfect beast,” he “was out for blood. I wanted to kick Metallica’s ass, and I couldn’t do that with amateurs. The mission was too important for dilettantes.” He first met Ellefson one morning when he went to the apartment downstairs to complain about the noise from Ellefson’s “Runnin’ with the Devil” bassline. (Mustaine was trying to sleep one off.) This was just days after Ellefson had moved from the family farm in rural Minnesota to make it in music. Although this sounds a little too biopic-convenient for reality, Ellefson plays a note-for-note cover of this account in his own autobiography, so one can feel safe in taking them at their word.

When Metallica had handed Mustaine his bus ticket out of New York, he told them, “Okay. But don’t take any of my stuff,” by which he meant the several Metallica songs he helped write that — along with those on Slayer’s Reign in Blood (1986) and some of Megadeth’s own early work — essentially codified thrash metal for the decades to come. Of course, Metallica did take his stuff, with Kirk Hammett by then playing all of Mustaine’s old solos. Mustaine suspects in his memoir that “they just figured I’d never amount to anything and thus would not present any sort of a challenge to them.” Then he adds: “But they were way the fuck wrong.”

In a moment that seems even more biopic-convenient than that of Mustaine’s and Ellefson’s first meeting — but that Mustaine assures me is the precise truth — he was on the very bus that took him away from Metallica and toward the future when he found a pamphlet containing the words of Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA). “When you’re watching mile-post after mile-post click by,” he says, “you’ll read just about anything. Hell, I would have read one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses things at the time.” In the pamphlet, Cranston warned of the dangers of nuclear proliferation: “The arsenal of megadeath can’t be rid no matter what the peace treaties come to.” Mustaine took that idea and wrote a song off it called “Megadeth,” dropping the second a. He later changed the name of the song to “Set the World on Fire,” and kept the name of Megadeth for the band.

The band’s first album, Killing is My Business…and Business is Good! (1985), is by far their least-polished. The low budget provided by Combat Records meant a terribly muddied sound quality, while proper emphasis was not yet placed by the band on melody and song structure. Meanwhile, even Ellefson “wish[es] some of the tempos had been a bit less extreme.” This is one place where Mustaine’s quest for vengeance against Metallica got the better of him, and ended up hindering the band rather than propelling it forward. “We’d originally rehearsed the songs significantly slower,” Ellefson writes in My Life with Deth: Discovering Meaning in a Life of Rock & Roll (2013):

“Megadeth’s music had suddenly gotten much faster back in the fall of 1983 when Dave received a letter from a fan….Metallica had just released their debut album, Kill ’Em All, and this fan had written, ‘Dave, I hope your songs are faster than Metallica’s.’ The next day we sped up all the songs by about forty beats per minute. Extreme speed was deemed the cool factor in thrash metal back in those days, and that one fan letter changed Megadeth’s sound overnight.”

Fortunately this did not remain their modus operandi for long. By the time of their third album, So Far, So Good…So What! (1987) — the one that made them into stars — Megadeth was a sleek, sophisticated outfit, highly evolved and deliciously complex. Ellefson writes that many of the musicians who’ve auditioned with Megadeth during its many personnel changes have “assumed that they would get the gig without knowing that many of the nuances in Megadeth’s music are found in the picking hand, not just the fingerboard hand. A lot of guys learned the notes for the fretting hand, but never understood the rest until they got in the room with us. Other musicians, however, understood the advanced techniques behind our music.”