ANTHRAX are turning their album cover into a story. Ahead of the September 18 release of "Cursum Perficio" — their twelfth full-length and first new album in a decade — the thrash veterans have begun rolling out animated short clips that give each character on the artwork a backstory of their own.
The first instalment landed on July 28, and a new one arrives every Tuesday. The cover was created by artist Mark Stritzel, who developed the characters directly with drummer Charlie Benante, while the animation is the work of Emmanuel Cappellini.
Benante traced the concept back to a piece of movie marketing he never forgot. "When Tim Burton released 'The Nightmare Before Christmas', they did this whole ad campaign — 'Meet The Characters, Meet Jack, Meet Sally' — and they gave a little description about them," he explained. "This is what inspired the idea to release these stories about the characters."
"When we came up with the art for the cover, we felt the characters needed to have a backstory and not just be an image on an album cover," Benante continued. "For the magician, initially he was meant to be the younger version of the 'Among The Living' character, The Preacher. He could have been a magician when he was younger, and he is really sadistic. For the bride, Clara, and Dog, we wanted to make something that was another door into the cover and get a glimpse of who these characters are."
After the Magician, upcoming weeks will introduce the Woman In White, Dog, the Winged Skeleton, and finally Hands, concluding September 1.
"Cursum Perficio" — Latin for "my journey has come to an end" — follows 2016's "For All Kings", which debuted in the Billboard 200's Top 10. It will be issued through Megaforce in the U.S. and Nuclear Blast in Europe, with the lineup of Scott Ian, Charlie Benante, Frank Bello, Joey Belladonna and Jonathan Donais.
The album's second single, "The Edge Of Perfection", arrived with a video directed by Academy Award winner Joel Harlow, whose credits include "Star Trek" and "Alice In Wonderland". The clip follows its hero from a dream into an evening of magic and an encounter with underworld evil, cut with live performance footage.
Benante has been candid about the ten-year gap. "The honest answer I can give is, me personally, I didn't have it to write. I didn't feel it. It just wasn't the right time," he told Chris Jericho's "Talk Is Jericho" podcast. "And then the whole pandemic happened — which we started to actually write before the pandemic — and then that set us back two years."
Some of the material is considerably older than that. "There's a song called 'Target On My Back'; that's from 2015. There's a lot of stuff that was old that I had, and then there's some new songs that I felt, 'This is too good to hold back and wait. I want this out.'"