Dave Mustaine Shows His Hand: The Injury Behind Megadeth's Farewell

By Tom Whitfield

Dave Mustaine held up his left hand to roughly 200 people at New York's Kaufman Music Center and gave the physical reason Megadeth are retiring: Dupuytren's contracture.

"I have an injury to my hand. Some of you can see it," the frontman said at this month's launch event for his memoir, In My Darkest Hour. "I've got what's called Dupuytren's contracture. In the center of my hand, the tendons have grown together and are pulling my finger down."

Surgery remains an option, Mustaine said. His plan: finish the tour behind the band's latest record, then assess what medical technology can offer. He has considered singing without playing guitar, and rejected it. "I wouldn't want to do that," he said. "I would want to play guitar, because that's my love."

The moderator was Rolling Stone Senior Writer Kory Grow, who asked directly whether fans should believe the retirement announcement. Mustaine's raised hand was the answer.

Why the timing?

In August 2025, Mustaine announced that Megadeth would retire sometime after the release of their album Megadeth. "If there was ever a perfect time to tour the world, it's now," he wrote then. "This is also a perfect time for us to tell you that it's our last studio album."

The album arrived in January and debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200. Asked at the launch how that felt, Mustaine tilted his microphone upward and said, "Boiiiing," to the audience's amusement, then added: "It's a great feeling."

He also ruled out one obvious sequel. A Dave Mustaine solo album holds no interest for him, he said, because to him it would simply be another Megadeth album.

Is this really the end of new music?

Not entirely — and here the claim deserves scrutiny. Mustaine said the farewell tour "has felt bittersweet," but he hinted the band may keep issuing recordings:

• Live tracks from the final tour may become a future live album: "If we were to want to, say, have some live recordings of us playing songs for the future, it might be a good idea to record a bunch of different live tracks."
• Unreleased completed songs exist from the last album, recorded with bassist James LoMenzo, guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari and drummer Dirk Verbeuren — though Mustaine believes they are earmarked as label bonus tracks. "There may be a song or something, but I don't know."

That "I don't know" is the honest measure of how firm any of this is.

What was lost along the way

Mustaine revealed that an earlier book, titled Score, covering the stories behind the first 20 years of Megadeth songs, vanished after its label went under. "That book was written and turned into Sanctuary Records many, many years ago, and Sanctuary went bankrupt," he said. "They gave the book back, and I don't know what happened to it. … I just don't know if I want to write another book right now."

The hour-long conversation also covered his tongue-cancer diagnosis, the subject of In My Darkest Hour. A doctor delivered the news bluntly — "the Big C," as Mustaine put it. He credited the discipline from studying martial arts with carrying him through treatment.

His operating philosophy now is blunt in its own way. "I try to live every day like it's my last, because I don't know when that will be," he said.

Asked about his retirement plan, Mustaine said he wants to stay involved in music "whether it's as simple as listening to it or making it," and he hopes technological advances will help his hand heal.

What does this change for fans?

One last tour, a possible live album, a few orphaned studio tracks — and then, on the current evidence, silence from one of thrash metal's founding bands. Mustaine's own closing words leave the door ajar: "I don't want to be one of those people that crawls off into a cave and dies. I want to live hard and I want to play hard."