There was a time, almost a half-century after the midcentury invention of rock ’n’ roll, when one of its founders, Little Richard, would appear on television at every opportunity — not to play piano and sing, but to be a cut-up, to be camp. Thereupon he would shout, “I am the architect!” as if he felt people had forgotten it was he (along with Berry, Presley, Turner and others) who had invented rock.

Dave Mustaine (along with Hetfield, Hanneman, Ian and others) invented thrash metal but has no need to voice that claim. His music — an almost bewildering assemblage of guitar-fret aerobatics soaring and diving above a rhythm section that sounds like an exploding locomotive — says it for him.

Megadeth, the band he formed in 1983 and which plays Honolulu twice next week, was one of the first to play speed metal, also known as thrash. (There are distinctions, but none, other than the former’s connotation of constant quickness, need concern us here.) The band is one of the so-called Big Four, the other three commercially successful, pioneering acts being Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax.

These groups soaked up two streams of influence, merging the virtuoso musicianship of British metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden with the hyperfast aggression of American punk bands like Minor Threat and Verbal Abuse.

Mustaine stands out among his fellow architects: He has been a member of not one, but two of the fearsome foursome (Metallica being his prior outfit); he’s the only lead guitarist who is also the lead singer; and, talentwise and as a technician, he’s arguably the best musician of the lot.

He has help, of course: Band co-founder and bassist David Ellefson will be here, as will Mustaine’s latest lead guitar cohort, Brazilian shredder Kiko Loureiro. This iteration also includes Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler, who performed on the new album and is taking part in the current U.S. tour.

Opening the shows will be local thrash outfit Corrupt Absolute. Local metalheads will remember their opening performance at the Testament concert in October.

Megadeth’s new album, “Dystopia,” is, at the same time that it’s being praised as a masterpiece of guitar work, being hailed as “thrashier” than its most recent work. Rougher.

Fans are eating it up: It’s No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rock Albums and Hard Rock Albums charts, and No. 3 on its Top 200.

The record’s balance between technical precision and all-out aggression makes for something that sounds like the soundtrack to an elegant calamity, an intriguing disaster, an intellectually engaging depopulation.

Lyrically it paints a picture of a has-been America in a world gone to crap. The cover art looks futuristic, but “Dystopia” gives one the sense that the descent into chaos is a trip we’re already making. Typical of the record’s song titles is “Post-American World.”

Mustaine seems to espouse that our nation’s decline is partly of our own making. As he growls in “The Threat Is Real”: “See the burnished images / of a crestfallen agency / Violent conditioning / caused the nature of the enemy.”

In a departure from its predecessors, penultimate song “The Emperor” takes a more simple tack. Its six-note blues/hard-rock riff is decorated with Mustaine’s venomous spurts of condemnation and insult. It’s followed by a snarling cover of Los Angeles punk band Fear’s “Foreign Policy.”

Which brings to likely the most glaring difference between Mustaine and his Big Four brethren: He’s kind of a rock star jerk. (There’s a reason Metallica dumped him so long ago.)

He’s had big problems with alcohol and heroin. That aside, as he’s reportedly cleaned up, he’s just not a nice person.

When this reporter interviewed him in 1987, the guitarist was rude and dismissive, gave one-word answers and refused to speak loudly enough to be picked up by a tape recorder.

Then when this reporter, curious as to whether the artist had changed, sat down for a phone interview with him in 2016, his manager suddenly said Mustaine wouldn’t participate unless the interview was recorded. Having secured a new recorder, the journalist has waited weeks for a rescheduled chat that didn’t happen.

That’s not all. He has famously come out as an anti-Obama birther, and in the wake of U.S. mass shootings, he said this in 2012, onstage in Singapore: “Back in my country, my president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he’s staging all of these murders.”

Finally, take this 2014 headline, from online metal magazine Metal Injection: “Dave Mustaine continues to be an unpleasant person.”

But he sure is a hot guitarist, and his band sure is good — and next week’s concerts will be spectacular!