The nominees for the Grammys Best Metal Performance category in 2019 is actually looking pretty decent. The awards show has nominated Between The Buried And Me, Deafheaven, High On Fire, Trivium, and Underoath. Which is cool but those artists don't exactly fall in the same categories of metal. Which is why Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine is working to have more metal-related categories added to the award show.
Mustaine tells San Francisco's 107.7 The Bone that he and producer Johnny K tried a few years back to accomplish this but failed. Mustaine says he and a much larger collective will be trying again in 2020 to petition the Grammys to add more metal categories.
"I joined the Grammy chapter out in Nashville to address that exact thing, I joined the Grammy chapter because we have one metal category and I think they've got a dozen polka categories. I stopped going to the Grammys because you'd have to sit through, like, 30 Latin jazz records, and then you'd have to sit through another 30 jazz Latin records. And it's, like, 'What?'
So a couple of years ago, the guy that produced our record Th1rt3en, Johnny K, and a couple of other guys at the Grammys tried to get another [heavy metal] category, and they were so close, but it failed. And I called them up and I said, 'We're doing this.' So 2020, we're fighting — we're getting all of the metal labels that we know, we're trying to get them all together to petition the Grammys to give us another metal category."
It also makes sense to have these different genre awards because some years haven't exactly made a ton of sense. The most recent example of that being when Tenacious D beat out Anthrax, Motorhead, Mastodon and Slipknot. Megadeth is currently working on a new album with ex-Soilwork drummer Dirk Verbeuren to be out in 2019.
