Dave Mustaine has revealed that the new Megadeth album is partially written and is scheduled for a 2019 release.

Speaking exclusively to Kerrang!, Dave said he was planning to release the 16th Megadeth album later this year.

“Hopefully a 2019 release,” he tells Kerrang!. “I thought it would be out this summer but we’ve been on tour for a while and when we came home the guys went their separate ways. They have to pay their bills.

“Dirk [Verbeuren, drums] hasn’t been in the band very long so he doesn’t have any real income from Megadeth. Being in a smaller band as well, he had things he needed to do and I totally support him playing with other people when Megadeth aren’t on the road.

Same with Kiko [Loureiro]. He’s a very talented musician and he would not feel fulfilled if all he ever did was make Megadeth records. I don’t believe it would be right to keep Kiko just playing in Megadeth because he plays bossa nova and calypso and classical and metal and rock… he can play anything. So if I said he could only play with us, shame on me!

“With all that in mind we haven’t really had a lot of time to work on the new record and I’m still waiting on getting everybody in the same room.”

We recently reported that Dave’s son described the upcoming album as sounding “heavy as hell”, and now it appears that heaviness is taking shape, with a handful of songs fully formed.

“I’ve got about eight songs written myself at this point,” Dave says. “Of this eight probably three are completely done musically, to the point where I would record them tomorrow. I want to get in the studio and start woodshedding until I have the material we need or until the guys come and start contributing – because I welcome their songwriting. It’s just getting us all in the same room and waiting for the inspiration.”

An album isn’t the only new material we’ll be seeing from the Megadeth camp this year; the band are releasing their very own graphic novel titled Death By Design, featuring comic book stories inspired by the band’s songs.

But what is it about Megadeth’s music that lends itself to visual storytelling?

“If I had typical lyrics that were just the normal verse-chorus sort of stuff, if the lyrics weren’t important to me, there’d be nothing to write about,” Dave tells us. “But because I kind of look at a song as a story and write from that perspective, that makes them ideal for that sort of format. Even our biggest song ever, which was Trust, that was the Number One song in America at one point; it’s a story. It’s not like some of the songs that are out now where they sing the words because they have a certain cadence or rhythm to them.”

Death By Design is released June 5 and comes in four different editions.

Megadeth’s 35-song anthology Warheads On Foreheads is released March 22.