For Fans of Megadeth

If you are coming to Megadeth for the first time, Rust in Peace (1990) is the album. Every technical element the band ever had arrives at once: Marty Friedman and Dave Mustaine trading riffs that sound mathematically impossible at that tempo, Nick Menza's drumming holding it all together, and lyrics about alien visitations and nuclear brinkmanship that feel genuinely ominous rather than cartoonish. It is not the most accessible Megadeth record. It is the best one.

Endgame (2009) landed during a period when most people had written Megadeth off after the revolving-door lineup years. It is a concept album about civil liberties erosion and surveillance creep that sounds remarkably pointed today. The title track alone is nine minutes of controlled anger. The record never gets the conversation that Rust in Peace and Peace Sells do, and it deserves it.

Metal: Hellsinger is the game that understands why Megadeth sounds the way it does. The entire mechanical proposition is that precision makes the music louder and more violent. Play sloppy, the soundtrack stays muted. Lock into the rhythm, and the track opens up into something enormous. It is the closest a game has come to capturing the feeling of a Megadeth riff clicking into place.

"Peace Sells" asks who is buying the promise of peace sold by governments that keep building weapons. WarGames (1983) asks whether the people controlling those weapons have any idea what they are doing. Both were made in the same early-1980s nuclear anxiety window and both land the same conclusion: the system is being run by people who have convinced themselves they are rational while behaving like gamblers. Watch the film after the album and the pairing is almost too clean.