I didn’t think it would affect me this much.
Bands end.
Musicians retire.
Men age.
The world moves on like it never promised anything.
But when Megadeth released their final album,
I felt something fold inward and go cold.
Not dramatically.
Just… gone.
Like a light turning off
in a room I didn’t realize I lived in.
My first reaction wasn’t sadness.
It was embarrassment.
Of all things,
I was affected by a heavy metal band.
A genre people stop taking seriously
somewhere around adulthood.
But underneath that,
the weight stayed.
Nostalgia is warm.
This wasn’t.
This felt like losing something
I didn’t know I was still leaning on.
—
I was fifteen when I first heard Countdown to Extinction.
It was the first metal record I ever touched.
Where I grew up, this kind of music didn’t belong anywhere.
No radio station played it.
No magazine covered it.
Albums were hidden in corners of music stores,
half-illegal, half-myth.
Like pornography.
Like contraband.
It was treated like rot.
A moral corruption.
Which was perfect marketing
for a fifteen-year-old boy.
I popped the CD in.
Pressed play.
And when that first hit of Skin O’ My Teeth landed,
something in me lit up.
I didn’t know why.
It wasn’t rage.
It wasn’t rebellion.
I wasn’t angry at the world.
I was a good kid.
Loving family.
Lots of friends.
I served in church.
And yet,
something in my body recognized it.
Not as music.
As something else
I wasn’t meant to explain.
—
Now it feels like a full circle.
Thirty-three years on,
I’m sitting here,
listening to their final record,
surprised by how emotional I feel.
I play the album over and over again.
Not because it’s their best.
Not because it needs decoding.
I play it
the way you replay a voice message
you’re afraid you won’t be able to hear again.
And somewhere between listens,
something uncomfortable starts to surface.
Not a thought.
A feeling.
A familiar one.
—
I think about how often I’ve been in rooms
full of people,
doing exactly what was needed of me.
Blending in.
Keeping things light.
Making sure I didn’t take up space.
Always taking the backseat
so no one else had to.
I was good at it.
I became the guy who goes with the flow.
The easy one.
The one who doesn’t complicate things.
The one who doesn’t make demands.
People liked me that way.
—
I think about the times I tried to share
the things that actually made me feel alive.
Art.
Music.
Poems.
Films.
Books.
I remember the smiles.
The nods.
The polite patience.
The way the room quietly moved on.
Like I’d brought up something unnecessary.
Something no one asked for.
And every time,
I learned the same thing.
Not through words.
Through faces.
—
So I adjusted.
I softened.
I translated.
I paid attention to what kept people comfortable.
And somewhere along the way,
without ever deciding to,
I learned how to make myself smaller
so people would stay.
—
And now I understand
why I’ve been listening to Megadeth for over thirty years.
Why metal became my sanctuary.
Not because of the speed.
Or the aggression.
Or the skill.
And not rebellion.
But because this was the one place
where music that didn’t belong anywhere,
music judged, demonised, dismissed,
could exist without apology.
A place where not belonging
didn’t need to be explained.
It just was.
And so was I.
Megadeth was a voice beside me all these years, saying:
You’re not crazy.
You’re not defective.
You don’t have to explain yourself.
You don’t have to beg to belong.
They gave my displacement a voice.
They made it feel like not fitting in
wasn’t a personal failure.
It was a fact.
A position.
A truth you could stand in.
So as I listened to their final track,
I realised what I was really grieving.
I was grieving the fifteen-year-old boy
who found something that didn’t belong
and finally felt like he wasn’t wrong.
I was grieving how long I’ve lived like this,
liked, welcomed, included,
and still quietly convinced
that if I stopped adapting,
no one would stay.
Because I honestly don’t know who would.
This isn’t me reviewing an album.
This is me saying goodbye
to an old friend
who never asked me
to be anything else.
—
Thank you, Dave.
Not for the riffs.
For the permission.
For making room
for a boy
who couldn’t find it anywhere else.
For standing with me all these years
so I didn’t have to kneel.
Featured image adapted from a photo by Laura Cleffmann
See more on Unsplash: @cloudett
Video embedded from Megadeth’s official YouTube page: @megadeth
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