Anthrax Release Much-Anticipated Album "Cursum Perficio”
“Big Four” band Anthrax release their latest album “Cursum Perficio” and Video for a new title track via Nuclear Blast Records.
“The first goal was getting motivated,” Charlie Benante - Anthrax drummer and chief songwriter, says about the veteran thrash band’s first album in a decade. “It takes a lot to write a record, and I wasn’t really up to it for a long time. When I started to get the urge again, things just started to happen. You start to accumulate things and you start placing them, and they become songs.”
This lead to Anthrax’s twelfth album, Cursum Perficio, since forming in 1981. In part the record documents the band’s trajectory from Queens to international superstars and frontrunners of the so-called big four of thrash metal - alongside Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth. “There’s a lot of talk about this whole journey that we’ve bene on for decades now,” Benanate says, and Cursum Perficio feels like a culmination of it all.
To celebrate the album’s release, the multi-Grammy award nominated New York hard rock titans, Scott Ian (guitar), Charlie Benante (drums), Frank Bello (bass), Joey Belladonna (vocals) and Jonathan Donais (guitar) last night joined fans at a late night store signing in Louisville’s Guestroom Records following their September 17 performance at the city’s annual Louder than life festival. They’ve also enlisted Director Don Argott, responsible for the Taylor Swift docu-series (now there’s a crossover and a half, Anthrax and Taylor Swift) and actor London May for a spellbinding video that sums up what this new era of Anthrax is about, having enlisted this record for their first since 2016’s For All Kings, which debuted in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200. The phase, Cursum Perficio is Latin, for '“My Journey has come to an end”, “My journey is over” or “I complete my journey” which sums up a complete body of work - that Anthrax have very much delivered on.
It is a byproduct of a release that has been in the works since 2022, working out of Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in Los Angeles. To Anthrax, this is their “magnum opus” - and it delivers on fan expectations and then some, creating an album that feels as alive and aggressive as their most celebrated classics.
Watch the video here.
“‘Cursum Perficio’ brought out the beast in me,” says London May. “I broke my finger the very first day and had to beg them to keep shooting. That was real chain [the chain he is shackled with in the video was real metal…heavy and real…not a prop chain] and real pain. I went through hell and back for Anthrax and Don Argott—and I’d happily do it all again!”
“The video for ‘Cursum Perficio’ captures all of the themes I’m exploring in the lyric,” Scott Ian notes. “They’re epic in scope…how do you quantify your life? How do you measure oceans of time and what did you do with it? And were all the struggles worth it in the end?”
“What I love about this video is that it matches the tone of the song so well,” Charlie Benante says. “This song has always been the dark horse of the record, this video may be as well.”
The CURSUM PERFICIO track listing is as follows:
01. Persistence of Memory
02. The Long Goodbye
03. It’s For the Kids
04. Everybody’s Got A Plan
05. The Edge Of Perfection
06. Infectious
07. NYC93
08. Cursum Perficio
09. T.O.M.B
10. Watch It Go
11. My Victory
Buy Cursum Perficio here: https://anthrax.bfan.link/cplp
Watch the video for 'Cursum Perficio' here: https://youtu.be/sJopVPdbPJk
L-R: Frank Bello, Joey Belladonna, Jonathan Donais, Charlie Benante, Scott Ian
Photo credit: Travis Shinn