Ten years. Eleven new songs, fifty three minutes and forty three seconds, a twelfth studio album, and the longest gap between two records in this band's history sitting behind all of it. Cursum Perficio is worth every month of that wait for about twenty five minutes. After that it settles into being a good Anthrax album, which is a different thing.
The last of the Big Four still putting new records into shops rather than anniversary tickets, Anthrax released this one on 18 September 2026 through Megaforce at home and Nuclear Blast everywhere else, eleven songs cut at Studio 606 in Northridge with Jay Ruston producing for the third time and the same five men who made For All Kings in 2016 standing in the same places: Joey Belladonna singing, Scott Ian and Jonathan Donais on guitars, Frank Bello on bass, Charlie Benante on drums. Nobody was replaced. Only the years moved.
What the decade actually held was one live album, Kings Among Scotland, filmed at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow on 15 February 2017 and put out on 27 April 2018, and then a long run of other people's stages, Canadian dates with Megadeth in February and March of this year and the North American Run For Your Lives shows with Iron Maiden. Belladonna began singing these songs on 5 November 2023. So take the record for what it is: a subway car pulled off the line for ten years, stripped to the frame, rewired, repainted and put back into service on the same New York steel it always ran on. It moves. What it stops for is the argument.
"It's for the Kids" tears the handrails out of the carriage: four minutes and twenty seconds of straight thrash with the downstrokes cut to machine tolerance, released as the first single on 15 May and still the plainest evidence here that these five can do the simple thing better than bands a third of their age. The album does not open that way. "Persistence of Memory" spends a minute and seven seconds clearing its throat, and anybody who came for the doors to come off at the top is kept waiting.
The two that earn it
"The Long Goodbye" is where the record actually starts. Five and a half minutes about dementia, about a person being taken out of their own life one piece at a time, played at the tempo the subject demands instead of the tempo the genre would prefer, closer in weight and mood to Persistence of Time in 1990 than to anything on the past two albums. Belladonna never raises his voice on it. That instrument has not thinned and has not been propped up behind a wall of production, and it is still the thing that separates this band from nearly everyone of its vintage.
"The Edge of Perfection" is the other one, six minutes and forty six seconds long, and it is the only song here that goes somewhere the band has never been: melodic, patient, with a stretch of cold tremolo picking dragged in from black metal and set down in the middle of a thrash record. This is where the album divides a room. Hear that passage as five men of forty years' standing reaching past their own vocabulary, or hear it as a veteran act trying on a coat cut for somebody else. I take the first reading. It is the boldest thing on the album and the only place where the ten years read as work rather than delay.
Benante is the third rail under all of it, a live current nobody touches and nobody switches off, and once you start listening for the drums the songs rearrange themselves around them. Ruston's mix carries real tonnage without being sanded smooth, Donais solos on a clean melodic line rather than a flurry of notes, and "Everybody's Got a Plan", the third single back in August, walks off with the best chorus on the record. Nothing here sounds like a band going through the motions.
Where the record runs local
My habit with a returning band is to stop listening for the singles and start counting at track seven, because that is where the goodwill usually runs out. It runs out here at eight. "NYC 93" is the last live wire in the running order, four minutes and forty eight seconds at punk velocity with a gang vocal hook and the city in the title, and everything after it slows to a local service, stopping at every station whether anyone is waiting or not. The title track takes six minutes and eight seconds to say what it has said by the third, a strong riff repeated until the repetition becomes the subject. "Watch It Go" is built out of good material that never resolves into one song. "Infectious" would have hit harder anywhere else in the sequence; arriving straight after the album's peak, it goes by unnoticed.
Two songs here will outlast the album they arrived on, and both of them are over before the halfway mark.
Ian spent the promotional run comparing the energy of this record to Among the Living in 1987, and the comparison does it no favours. What works here works because it is slower, sadder and more patient than anything on that record, not because it is faster. The Latin title translates as the completion of a journey, and the band has been at pains to say it is not meant as a last one. Believe them. Nothing in these fifty three minutes sounds like five people finishing anything.
So: a well-built, hard-worn thrash album with two genuinely fine songs at the front and a back half that would be better for losing ten minutes. For anyone who filed this band under touring museum after 2016, the first twenty five minutes are a correction worth hearing, and the correction is real. For anyone waiting on the record that moves the furniture of the genre again, it is not this, and a ten year wait buys no extra credit at the door. Keep "The Long Goodbye" and "The Edge of Perfection". The rest you will play twice and then go back to those two.