My relationship with Anthrax did not begin with “Fistful of Metal”. Or “Spreading the Disease”. Or even “Among the Living”.
I arrived somewhere around “Persistence of Time” in 1990, which is probably why I have always heard Anthrax slightly differently to some of the people who grew up with them.
Then came the rap-metal experiment. And I’ll give them this: it was fucking cool.
Working with Public Enemy on “Bring the Noise” was genuinely different, and historically important. I understood what they were doing. I appreciated what they were doing. I could even recognise that it mattered. But it didn’t set my world on fire.
Then Belladonna was gone.
And, if I’m being honest, I didn’t really follow the band closely after that.
John Bush arrived and Anthrax didn’t collapse. They changed.
Bush’s voice was lower. Rougher. Heavier. More lived-in.
Suddenly Anthrax sounded less like a thrash band trying to survive the 1990s and more like a band that had discovered another version of itself.
“Sound of White Noise” arrived in 1993 and basically said: we’re still here. On the album was “Only.”
James Hetfield reportedly told Scott Ian and John Bush it was a perfect song. You don’t need to agree with Hetfield. But you understand the point.
“Only” is fucking good. And that album remains the obvious doorway into the Bush years.
But what interests me now is what those four records say about bands.
“Stomp 442” didn’t sound like “Sound of White Noise”.
“Volume 8: The Threat Is Real” didn’t sound like either.
And “We’ve Come for You All” arrived in 2003 sounding like a band that had somehow found another gear after everyone had already decided the interesting part of its career was over.
Four albums. Four different versions of Anthrax.
And there is another part of the Anthrax story that gets overlooked.
Scott Ian is the face of the riff machine. But Charlie Benante has been sitting behind the kit writing a huge amount of the music.
Benante doesn’t just play drums. He writes riffs. Which makes sense when you listen closely.
The best Anthrax riffs aren’t merely fast. They move. They swing. They stop. They start.
They punch you in the chest and then somehow make you want to jump around like an idiot.
It’s also why Anthrax never quite fit neatly inside the thrash-metal box.
They could be brutal without being miserable. Technical without becoming clinical. Heavy without losing the groove. And funny without turning into a joke band.
That’s a difficult combination.
Then Joey came back.
“Worship Music” in 2011. “For All Kings” in 2016. And suddenly the story became something else again.
The band was older. The world had changed. And yet Anthrax were still making records that sounded like Anthrax.
Then came the silence between albums. Ten years. That’s an eternity in modern music.
Especially in heavy metal, where bands have increasingly been turned into content machines.
Album. Tour. Album. Tour. Anniversary edition. Deluxe edition. Box set. Reissue. Tour.
Repeat.
Anthrax didn’t do that with new albums.
Scott Ian has explained that the band toured “For All Kings” through 2019, started working on new material, and then the pandemic threw the entire 2020 recording plan into a ditch.
And Charlie Benante wasn’t sitting around doing nothing.
He was also touring the world with Pantera, alongside Zakk Wylde, filling the roles associated with Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell. That wasn’t some quick side-project cameo. It became a substantial touring commitment, beginning with Pantera’s return to the stage in 2023 and continuing through subsequent world touring.
So add the pandemic, the writing process, touring and the simple reality of being a musician in his sixties, and that ten-year gap starts looking less mysterious.
Benante has also offered an even more interesting explanation.
Sometimes he simply didn’t have anything to say.
I like that.
Because it’s honest.
There is something fundamentally broken about the idea that an artist should manufacture something simply because the calendar says it’s time.
Imagine telling a painter:
“Sorry, it’s been four years. We need another painting.”
Or a novelist:
“Your last book came out in 2016. Get typing.”
Actually, don’t tell George R.R. Martin that. We’re already waiting.
But that’s exactly how the music business increasingly thinks.
Content. Output. Engagement. Release cycles. Streams.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the actual reason musicians started making music in the first place gets lost.
Maybe you actually have to have something to say.
That brings us to “Cursum Perficio”, released September 18, 2026.
Anthrax’s twelfth studio album.
Scott Ian.
Charlie Benante.
Frank Bello.
Joey Belladonna.
Jon Donais.
And Donais is an interesting piece of this story.
He’s not an original-era Anthrax guy. He’s from Shadows Fall, one of the bands that helped define the New Wave of American Heavy Metal that emerged around the turn of the millennium. Shadows Fall have released seven studio albums, toured extensively around the world and spent years building their own place in American metal before Donais eventually joined Anthrax.
So even the current Anthrax lineup isn’t simply preserving the past.
You’ve got members carrying four decades of Anthrax history, a guitarist who came out of another generation of American metal, and a drummer who has spent the last few years simultaneously carrying the legacy of Vinnie Paul onstage with Pantera.
That’s a lot of history in one band.
And if you’re expecting a concept album, forget it.
But there is something underneath “Cursum Perficio”.
Time. Age. Loss. Politics. Memory. Mortality. The absurdity of getting older while the world keeps getting weirder.
“The Edge of Perfection” is about chasing an impossible ideal.
Health. Happiness. Love. Empathy.
The things you spend half your life trying to understand and the other half realising you should have understood earlier.
The ethereal clean-tone chords give way to blast beats and T1000 down-picking.
Perfection right there.
And the “wo-oh-ah” chants are subtle but important.
“Nobody’s coming to save you.”
The ugly moment when self-awareness stops being interesting and becomes responsibility. You can analyse yourself forever, explain every scar, blame every circumstance, but eventually the excuses run out.
Nobody is coming.
You have to pick up the pieces and decide what happens next.
“It’s for the Kids” goes after the horror and normalisation of school shootings.
“Your thoughts and prayers mean nothing.”
This is Anthrax doing what metal does best: taking the polite language of institutions and throwing it back in their faces.
We’ve heard the statement. Seen the ritual. Watched nothing change.
The song isn’t asking for another speech.
It’s asking why we keep accepting one. At some point, words become wallpaper.
Listen to the solo by Jon Donais.
“Everybody’s Got a Plan” looks at division and the machinery of divide and conquer. It’s got an intoxicating vibe, especially in the verses.
“Great events turn on small hinges.”
History rarely moves the way we imagine.
We obsess over the big speeches, the big leaders, the big moments. But the world can turn on something tiny, stupid, accidental.
Then we’re left fighting each other, wondering how everything got so fucked up.
“The Long Goodbye” deals with dementia.
“Authentic in its mediocrity.”
That’s the line.
It turns the song from being about death into being about something worse: slowly disappearing while still alive.
The routines. The clock. The obligations. The days that look identical.
We call it normal life.
Maybe it’s just death happening incrementally, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.
“NYC 93” looks backward at the chaos of the band’s early-90s existence.
“I’d never been so awake in my whole life.”
That’s the song.
Not New York. Not 1993. Not the drinking, chaos or skeletons.
It’s about being broke, reckless, young, slightly fucked up and completely alive.
And then there’s the adult looking back and realising that chaos wasn’t necessarily the problem.
It was also the source of the electricity.
“Enough skeletons to fill Père Lachaise” is great because the song suddenly gets bigger than one guy’s memories.
Everybody carries ghosts.
Everybody has a version of themselves they buried somewhere.
And then:
“It ain’t worth doing unless you do it to death.”
It sounds like a death wish, but I don’t hear it that way.
I hear commitment. If you’re going to live, make it count. If you’re going to make something, fucking make it.
Which brings us back to that first verse.
1993 wasn’t necessarily better. It was just more alive.
And then there is the title track.
“Cursum Perficio”.
A Latin phrase that translates roughly as “I complete my journey” or “My journey is over.”
Which, depending on how you want to read it, sounds an awful lot like an ending.
“Failure in every success / So choose to change.”
That’s the line.
How much of your life is circumstance, and how much is the story you keep telling yourself about it?
The veil is the bullshit.
The damaged lens is the way we interpret our own history.
You can spend your entire life looking backward through fear, regret and failure—or eventually decide that the interpretation itself has to change.
And then:
“Death should tremble to take you.”
That’s the payoff.
Not because death has been defeated. It hasn’t.
It’s because you’ve finally stopped living like someone waiting for permission.
The journey’s over.
But the final line tells you it isn’t really over at all:
“It’s always been your choice.”
That turns the title inside out.
Cursum Perficio isn’t necessarily “this is the end.”
It’s: you’ve reached the end of one version of yourself.
Now decide what happens next.
And maybe that’s the best way to hear Anthrax in 2026.
They’ve survived Belladonna leaving.
They survived the Bush years.
They survived changing labels, changing formats, Napster, downloads, Spotify and the collapse of the album business.
They waited when they had nothing to say.
Charlie Benante went and played Pantera.
Jon Donais brought another generation of American metal into the room.
And now they’ve made another Anthrax record.
Maybe “Cursum Perficio” is the end.
Maybe it isn’t.
That’s not really the point.
The point is that Anthrax have spent forty-plus years proving that the obvious ending isn’t necessarily the ending.
Sometimes it’s just another change in direction.
Sometimes the smartest thing a band can do is wait until it has something worth saying.
Then turn the amplifiers on.
