Drummer Shawn Drover and guitarist Chris Broderick quit thrash metal titan Megadeth on the same day — Nov. 25, 2014 — within hours of each other.

Barely a month later, Broderick went on SiriusXM channel Liquid Metal to announce his new band with Drover, Act of Defiance.

The timing may have seemed more than coincidental, but according to Broderick, Act of Defiance was never part of his or Drover’s plans when they both quit Megadeth. Even though Broderick was aware Drover was unhappy in Megadeth, the drummer’s decision to quit still took him by surprise.

“Well, Shawn, (longtime Megadeth bassist David) Ellefson and I, we all talked regularly and stuff like that, but I had no clue that Shawn was — I mean, I knew that he was disgruntled and stuff, and so was I,” Broderick said recently from his home in Los Angeles.

“The decision to leave was a very long one, one that was a long time in the making, and when Shawn decided to leave, it was sort of out of the blue that he had done it at that moment. But I knew he had made the right choice because Dave (Mustaine, Megadeth lead singer and guitarist) was getting ready to start the new CD; he was calling us to work on times to get us to come to his studio and start working on it, and that’s the absolute wrong time to go into something if your heart’s not in it. So that was the time to go.”

Broderick initially planned to focus on the solo material he had amassed since joining Megadeth in 2008. But forming an actual working metal band with Drover, rather than a solo project, proved irresistible.

“When Shawn left, it was just like, you know what? The time is right,” Broderick said. “Otherwise I’m gonna be going down to the studio and working down there when I don’t know if I’m gonna see the project through (to) the next CD. At that point I was like, you know what, he made the right choice and I’m gonna make the right choice too.”

Act of Defiance — also featuring vocalist Henry Derek (formerly of Scar the Martyr) and bassist Matt Bachand (former guitarist for Shadows Fall) — dropped its 10-song debut “Birth and the Burial” last summer. The band has since hit the road hard — its North American summer tour fires up in earnest this weekend with a headlining appearance Saturday at the fourth annual Central Oregon Metalfest at Third Street Pub.

This year Metalfest expands to two nights, Friday and Saturday. Friday will focus on the sludge/doom side of the genre, with Castle and Atala headlining. The thrashers and death metal growlers get their chance to shine Saturday, with Colorado’s Skinned co-headlining with Act of Defiance. A bevy of local and regional acts fill out the rest of the bills.

That’s not to say Act of Defiance is a thrash metal or death metal band. “Birth and the Burial’s” songs bear this out, from the spastic riffing of single “Throwback” to the classical strains of “Refrain and Re-Fracture” and “Poison Dream.” The latter track in particular subverts genre ideals with mournful piano and cello, combining Broderick’s classical and jazz training with his more obvious metal tendencies.

After years of basically playing “hired gun” roles to Mustaine in Megadeth (as Broderick has stated before in interviews since leaving the band), Drover and Broderick wanted the freedom to play whatever music they wanted. Many of the songs grew out of riffs and ideas the two originally wrote for Megadeth.

“Obviously we want to be metal, and we want to present metal,” Broderick said. “But at the same time, the whole reason that Shawn and I are here at this point is because we wanted our freedom to be able to express ourselves the way that we think the music wants to be expressed. I think that’s our mantra from the get-go. So if somebody wanted to try and put a polka bit into a song, we’d be all for it.”

The album was recorded in three different studios — Broderick and Derek recorded their parts at Broderick’s L.A. studio, while Drover tracked in Connecticut and Banchard in Massachusetts. Live, the group has worked to present its often intricate compositions with just four people, using occasional loops to fill in the extra guitar tracks found on the record.

“(It was) really chaotic in a way,” Broderick said of the band’s first rehearsals after recording was finished. “… But I think, you know, when you’ve done this for as long as we have, it’s one of those things where you kind of come to some quick conclusions about the parts that you’re going to play. … The first tour was really kind of like a growing point for us as far as how we were gonna interact together onstage and how things were gonna roll as far as the live show. And it’s been great.”