MEGADETH To Tour U.S. With MESHUGGAH, TESSERACT: Dates Announced

MEGADETH will join forces with MESHUGGAH, TESSERACT and LILLAKE for around dozen dates in the U.S. and Canada in June and July.

The details are as follows:

Jun. 23 - Big Flats, NY @ Tags Summer Stage
Jun. 25 - Boston, MA @ House of Blues
Jun. 27 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Fillmore
Jun. 28 - Portsmouth, VA @ Portsmouth Pavilion
Jun. 29 - Silver Spring, MD @ The Fillmore
Jun. 30 - Columbus, OH @ Express Live
Jul. 05 - Windsor, ON @ Colosseum at Caesar's Windsor (MEGADETH and MESHUGGAH only)
Jul. 07 - Saint Charles, MO @ Family Arena
Jul. 08 - Oklahma City, OK @ The Zoo Amphitheater
Jul. 09 - Houston, TX @ Revention Music Center
Jul. 11 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE

MEGADETH was honored with in the "Best Metal Performance" category in the pre-telecast ceremony at the 59th annual Grammy Awards, which was held on February 12 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. MEGADETH was nominated for "Dystopia", the title track of its 2016 album.

Last August, Mustaine told a fan on Twitter that he hoped he had "two more" MEGADETH albums in him before calling it quits.

MEGADETH recently completed a month-long U.S. tour with AMON AMARTH, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, METAL CHURCH and BUTCHER BABIES.

In a 2016 interview, Mustaine stated about the band's latest additions, Brazilian guitarist Kiko Loureiro, best known for his work with ANGRA, and former SOILWORK drummer Dirk Verbeuren: "Well, these guys are some of the best at what they do in the business, so it's really made me re-evaluate my playing. And usually I would not warm up before I would go out and play, because I know what I'm doing, and it's kind of like… I'm just a natural at it; for whatever reason, God blessed me with this gift. And seeing them now, they're just so fierce, it makes me wanna be the best I can be at what I do. Even if I am self-taught, even if it is something that I just was born with, I wanna be the best I can at it."

MESHUGGAH's latest album, "The Violent Sleep Of Reason", was released last October via Nuclear Blast. The disc was produced by the band and was engineered by Tue Madsen of Puk Studios in Kaerby, Denmark.

For "The Violent Sleep Of Reason" cover, MESHUGGAH once again enlisted Keerych Luminokaya who created the artwork for "Koloss" and "The Ophidian Trek" as well as the new images for each of the seven albums and three EPs featured in the "25 Years Of Musical Deviance" box set.

MESHUGGAH drummer Tomas Haake told Metal Hammer that the band recorded "The Violent Sleep Of Reason" live in the studio — marking the first time they have done that "in 20-25 years." He said: "It was time limitations that stopped us doing it before. And it's been interesting.

"If you put it all together using computers, then you often have to fix problems after the fact. I've gone back to records where I've not known every drum part. And once you do that, you can start with drums and then just add layers of guitars and then bass and it all sounds perfect.

"'Obzen' and 'Koloss' are great albums, but, to me, they are a little too perfect. It didn't really capture what we sounded like honestly. But where we recorded live, you get to hear the push and pull, one person might be a little ahead and the other might be a little behind. If you kill that, you can kill the energy."

He added: "So for us it was just about going back to those albums that inspired us when we were growing up, that were important to us in our formative years, and all of those bands had that energy. The albums in the '80s and early '90s had the rawness that I'm talking about — that's what we wanted to recapture."