New Marty Friedman Album, 'Inferno,' to Feature Collaborations with Jason Becker, Children of Bodom's Alexi Laiho and More

Marty Friedman's upcoming studio album, Inferno, will be released in early 2014 by Prosthetic Records.

The album will be the former Megadeth guitarist's first release intended for the US market since 2003’s Music for Speeding.

Inferno will feature collaborations with Children of Bodom's Alexi Laiho, Revocation's Dave Davidson, Rodrigo y Gabriela and Jason Becker, Friedman's old Cacophony bandmate.

"Each of the guests on this record took a song from scratch — they would write it and then I would arrange it and add my parts to it," Friedman says in the Holiday 2013 issue of Guitar World. "That way we were both invested in it and it's a little bit of a deeper experience."

According to Friedman, his new American label home had much to do with making Inferno a reality.

“I’ve been terribly ignorant about what’s been going on musically in the US for about the last eight or nine years,” he says. “But the people at Prosthetic put this thing together for me, with all these current musicians talking about my influence on them. It was really quite touching."

Friedman elaborated on the Metal Assault radio show:

"The idea that got me into doing this American thing is this record company, Prosthetic, put together kind of a list of the people who have said good things about me in the press in America. And I don't really follow what's going on outside of Japan, so I kind of really didn't know.

"The Prosthetic guys made this big list of all these people and they wrote this wonderful stuff about me. And I was literally drawn to tears with what these guys were saying, and how they were influenced by me, and just the stuff that they were saying about my music in detail and my playing."

Stay tuned for more updates about the album — and be sure check out the Holiday 2013 issue of Guitar World for more info. It's available now at the Guitar World Online Store.