Photo: Travis Shinn
Anthrax released "The Edge of Perfection" today (July 10), the second single from Cursum Perficio, the band's 12th studio album and their first in ten years, out September 18 via Megaforce Records.
The song is close to seven minutes long and spends its first 30 seconds nowhere near a riff. Clean guitar rings out over cymbals that shiver at the edge of the mix, and then a blastbeat kicks the door in. Scott Ian and Jonathan Donais send the riff up into a high tremolo buzz while Charlie Benante and Frank Bello carry the weight underneath, and Joey Belladonna sings a lament with the shape of a love song: "My heart breaks…I'm on the edge…I'm on the edge of perfection." Donais holds his solo until around the 4:45 mark, and it's fast and melodic at once, as much about the notes he bends and holds as the ones he burns through.
"The Edge of Perfection" spends much of its runtime drawing from blackgaze. The blastbeats, shimmering guitar textures and soaring melodies make Deafheaven an unavoidable reference point, even as Anthrax anchor the song in their own thrash identity. It's one of the boldest musical left turns they've taken in decades, and the payoff is enormous.
Pre Order Cursum PerficioAnthrax are 45 years into this, and Belladonna is 65, singing about the terror of having something to lose. For Ian, that's the whole point. "It's the apex predator of Anthrax songs," he says, going on to call it the best thing he's been part of creatively. He traces the sentiment to his wife and son, and to the understanding that he spent earlier versions of his life wrecking what he now protects. Love, as he puts it, "is perfection, and I like being on the edge of it." Charlie Benante reaches for older reference points, comparing the feeling in the room to what the band had writing "Only" and "Indians."
The video pushes the song's scale further. Directed by Joel Harlow, the Academy Award-winning make-up designer whose credits include Star Trek and Alice in Wonderland, it follows a hero out of a dream and into a night of magic that curdles into an encounter with underworld evil, cross-cut with performance footage.
Cursum Perficio follows 2016's For All Kings, which debuted in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200. The group began recording in earnest in 2022 at Studio 606, Dave Grohl's Los Angeles compound, with Jay Ruston producing alongside them. The title is Latin, and it translates roughly to "my journey has come to an end." The album arrives September 18, and it's available to pre-order now in our shop.
The single lands three days after Anthrax closed out the European leg of Iron Maiden's Run for Your Lives tour, wrapping July 7 at Lisbon's Estádio da Luz. They rejoin Maiden and Megadeth in North America in September for four of the biggest shows on that leg, and the last two land after the album is out.
Anthrax with Iron Maiden and Megadeth, 2026
Sept. 3: Montréal, QC / Parc Jean-Drapeau
Sept. 5: Harrison, NJ / Sports Illustrated Stadium
Sept. 25: Los Angeles, CA / BMO Stadium
Sept. 29: San Antonio, TX / Alamodome
