Which MEGADETH Album Does DAVID ELLEFSON Like Better: 'Risk' Or 'Super Collider'?

During a recent appearance on “The Metal Sucks Podcast”, David Ellefson was asked which of the two most consistently maligned MEGADETH albums he prefers: 2013’s “Super Collider” or 1999’s “Risk”.

“It’s funny,” the bassist responded (hear audio below). “The ‘Risk’ songs worked great acoustically — these really simple singer-songwriter kind of songs almost. ‘Super Collider’ has a lot of really heavy stuff on it. It’s definitely a much heavier record.

“I think with ‘Super Collider’, the setup and the launch of that record, I think, is what really polarized that album with the fans,” he continued. “Had we led with kind of the traditional format, which is you come out with a heavy track and then you move to the single — if we had come out with ‘Kingmaker’ and then moved to ‘Super Collider’, that record would have been received completely different. Because first impressions are lasting impressions.

“There was this big wait — MEGADETH were doing the ‘Big Four’; we did all this big stuff, SLAYER, MEGADETH and ANTHRAX tours again; we’re back on top as this real thrash band; and then, all of a sudden, the next song people hear from us is the ‘Super Collider’ track. It was, like, ‘Woah! What the hell happened?’ And ‘Super Collider’ is a perfectly fine song, if it was the second song you heard. But to come out of the gate swinging with something like ‘Kingmaker’ would have set an entirely different precedent. So it’s amazing how you can skew public opinion by what you see and hear first.”

Ellefson added: “I think ‘Super Collider’, there’s a lot of heavy tracks on it; there’s a lot of pretty crushing material on that one. So I’m probably a bigger fan, overall, of the ‘Super Collider’ album. When I hear it now, I remember, I go, ‘That had some pretty freakin’ crushing stuff on it.'”

Back in 2013, MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine told Ultimate Guitar that fans who didn’t like “Super Collider” are “people that wanna hear ‘Black Friday’ the rest of their lives. And I feel for them, man. I know the first time I heard AC/DC versus what they put out now, it’s a different time. I think that’s the whole thing about if you’re really a fan of the band, you grow with them or you stop being a fan. I always loved early AC/DC and I totally respect older AC/DC, but I was weaned on Bon Scott.”

Mustaine told Loudwire that the “Super Collider” title track was actually written several years before the album’s recording sessions. He explained: “The majority of the riffs in [the track] ‘Super Collider’, it’s a very simple song, there’s not a lot of stuff there. It was a file I had saved from several years before. I restructured the song a little bit and added a part to it and that’s how the song ended up being. It was just one of those songs that had a vibe to it. It wasn’t even that it was simple. After we finished ‘Super Collider’, people were saying, ‘Wow, it sounds like ‘Teenage Wasteland’ [THE WHO‘s ‘Baba O’Riley’]; it sounds like [AC/DC‘s] ‘Highway to Hell’; sounds like [VAN HALEN‘s] ‘Running With The Devil’.’ And I was like, ‘Well, those songs don’t suck.'”