ANTHRAX's twelfth album, "Cursum Perficio", arrives September 18 via Megaforce in the US and Nuclear Blast in Europe — ten years after "For All Kings". Speaking to Steve Harkins of TalkShopLive, Scott Ian argued that the decade is mostly an accounting artefact.
"It didn't really take a long time," he said. "We started working on this album for real in the beginning of '22, and I had the finished copy in my hands in November of '25. So whatever that math is — three, almost four years. So when people say 10 years, I get it, but you gotta remember, we toured 'For All Kings' until the end of 2019. And then we had COVID, which we weren't in any kind of head space to really be working." The band reconvened in a room in early 2022, and Ian says that reunion is audible on the record: "That's that energy of us getting to be a band again after those two years of COVID. We were just thrilled to be there."
The title is Latin for "my journey has come to an end" — a phrase that has caused some anxiety among fans, though Ian's account of the sessions sounds like anything but a band winding down. The test for a new song, he said, is physical: "We'll be having so much fun just playing it musically and banging our heads and usually smiling a lot, because once we feel that way, it's pretty easy for us to know how much fun it's going to be to play it live."
Which brings the problem: twelve albums, ninety minutes, one setlist. "It's not easy. This is our twelfth record. That's a lot of material to choose from," he said. "And the thing is, too, we're such a physical band live. I've always said, a 90-minute ANTHRAX show is minimum two-and-a-half-to-three-hour any other band show. So on a headline set, to make everyone happy with our setlist, it's just never going to happen. You just gotta hope that people enjoy what you're doing."
Three new songs are already in the set — "It's For The Kids", "Everybody's Got A Plan" and "The Edge Of Perfection", debuted at the St. Vitus reopening in Brooklyn we covered last week — plus an unreleased track, "NYC 93", which the band filmed a video for that night. "No barricade, old-school chaos, just stage diving and insanity." Ian also flagged "Infectious" and "Target On My Back" as songs he wants in.
The band celebrates the release with a midnight in-store signing at Guestroom Records in Louisville on September 18, straight after their Louder Than Life set. "Cursum Perficio" was produced by Jay Ruston and ANTHRAX at Studio 606 in Los Angeles.