Ten years is more than enough time in metal for a new album to accumulate expectations far larger than the music itself. In Anthrax’s case, there is also the weight of the name and the band’s place within thrash metal’s Big Four. „Cursum Perficio” could therefore have easily become a record built around safe references to its own past. Instead, the Americans’ twelfth studio album proves considerably more interesting. Even the Latin title – roughly translated as „I complete my journey” – sounds like the announcement of a door closing, yet the music repeatedly argues otherwise. The brief „Persistence of Memory” leads into the heavy and deeply personal „The Long Goodbye”, the classically thrashing „It’s for the Kids” follows soon after, and just under an hour later we are left with a record that feels less like a career summary than an attempt to gather the most important languages Anthrax has spoken over the years into one surprisingly coherent vocabulary. This is not another „Among the Living”, and thankfully it does not seem to be trying to become one. This is Anthrax in 2026: older, more self-aware, at times more melancholy, but still fully capable of hitting with tremendous force. The band members themselves have also stressed that the title should not be read as an unequivocal announcement that Anthrax is coming to an end.

The last full-length entry in the band’s discography was 2016’s „For All Kings”, a record that confirmed Joey Belladonna’s return was far more than a nostalgic interlude. Anthrax did not disappear in the years that followed: the band toured, celebrated anniversaries and its own history, while the lineup of Belladonna, Scott Ian, Charlie Benante, Frank Bello, and Jonathan Donais became so firmly established that it is difficult to think of Donais as the „new” guitarist anymore. The real issue was that new music simply took a very long time to arrive. Benante has admitted that for a while after „For All Kings” he simply did not feel the need to make another album, while Scott Ian struggled with writer’s block when it came to lyrics. Some of the ideas that eventually found their way onto „Cursum Perficio” date back to around 2015, while others were rediscovered almost by accident in archives of old demos. „It’s for the Kids” is one such example. That says a great deal about the nature of the album as a whole: it was not created during one brief burst of inspiration, but assembled from material that accumulated over years and was selected without the pressure of a release schedule.

 

The original plan was to begin serious work on a follow-up to „For All Kings” around 2020, but the pandemic halted the process before it could gather momentum. It was only once the musicians were able to get back into the same room that the project truly began to move forward. From 2022 onward, the band focused more intensely on new material, with a substantial portion of the recording taking place at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606. Jay Ruston, who knew Anthrax well from the previous two albums recorded after Belladonna’s return, once again handled production. In the meantime, Benante also took over the drum stool in the touring incarnation of Pantera, so the decade separating the two Anthrax albums was hardly a period of inactivity. The origin of the title is even more interesting. Benante came across the Latin phrase „Cursum Perficio” in a documentary about Marilyn Monroe – the words appeared on tiles outside her final home. In the context of Anthrax, the phrase came to suggest a journey brought to a certain point rather than a formal declaration that the band was finished. „The Long Goodbye” works in a similar way. Ian wrote it after the death of his father, who had lived with dementia for eight years. Themes of endings and farewells therefore run through the record not as some cheap tease about retirement, but as reflections on time, loss, and what remains after forty-five years of making music.

 

 

„Cursum Perficio” is, above all, an album deeply aware of its own identity. There is no anxious attempt to keep pace with a younger scene, nor any pretense that nothing has happened since 1987. Anthrax reaches for familiar tools from its past, but mixes them with everything learned over the decades that followed. „It’s for the Kids” is a four-minute shot of exactly the kind of music a classic Anthrax song should deliver: fast, sharp, driven by a huge chorus and a rhythm that practically choreographs the mosh pit by itself. „Everybody’s Got a Plan” leans on a heavier groove, with its central idea growing out of Mike Tyson’s famous line about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the face. The real breakthrough, however, comes with „The Edge of Perfection”. Nearly seven minutes long, the song opens atmospherically before blast beats and an almost black-metal texture push Anthrax into territory the band has previously approached with much greater caution. Crucially, none of that comes at the expense of melody or identity. „NYC 93” represents the opposite pole: rawer, more punk-thrash in character, and steeped in memories of early-1990s New York. That range turns out to be one of the album’s greatest strengths – „Cursum Perficio” plays almost like a catalog of Anthrax trademarks, yet never once sounds like a catalog of old Anthrax songs.

The greatest strength of the material, however, is that its best ideas extend far beyond stylistic nods designed to please longtime fans. „The Long Goodbye” carries a weight that cannot be reduced to its slower tempo alone; knowing the story of Ian’s father causes the earlier piano-led „Persistence of Memory” to function almost like a brief prologue to a story about memory gradually slipping beyond reach. The title track, „Cursum Perficio”, does not sound like a monumental sign reading „The End”, either. It feels more like a moment of stopping along the road to look back at the losses endured and the victories earned. Belladonna is excellent throughout. His voice remains one of the defining elements that sets Anthrax apart from much of classic thrash metal – he can lift a melody above a dense riff without robbing it of weight. Donais is given plenty of room for solos, Bello is beautifully present in the mix, and Benante once again reminds us that he is not only a formidable drummer but one of the chief architects of the band’s musical language. The closing stretch of „T.O.M.B.”, the nervous „Watch It Go”, and the catchy „My Victory” effectively raises the temperature after the more expansive middle section of the record. Particularly interesting is the relationship between „Persistence of Memory”, „The Long Goodbye”, and the title track: memory, farewell, and the completion of a journey create a loose thematic axis running through the album, even if the band itself has not presented it as a concept record.

 

 

Not everything lands with equal force, and that is exactly why it is difficult to place „Cursum Perficio” alongside Anthrax’s greatest classics. After the exceptionally strong run from „It’s for the Kids” through „The Edge of Perfection”, the pace eases somewhat with „Infectious”. It is a solid, heavy track and will probably be extremely effective live, but next to the album’s more distinctive songs it feels slightly conservative. The six-minute title track also takes time to reveal all of its layers, which can make it seem less immediate on first listen. „Watch It Go” contains several excellent sections, although its stop-start construction sometimes emphasizes contrast more than fluidity. There are also moments when Anthrax seems determined to fit too many versions of itself onto one record – thrash, groove, melody, punk attitude, and the heavier character of its later years – which costs the material a little of its immediacy. There is no new „Caught in a Mosh” or „Only” here, no song that becomes an obvious point of reference after a single listen. What we get instead are compositions that grow stronger with repeated exposure, and for a band with a catalog this substantial, that is hardly a serious criticism.

 

Ultimately, „Cursum Perficio” accomplishes perhaps the most important thing an Anthrax album could accomplish after ten years of studio silence: it does not sound like an obligation. It is not an accessory to another tour, nor an attempt to prove that musicians in their sixties can still play fast. They have nothing left to prove on that front. Instead, this is the work of a band that knows exactly where it came from but has no intention of living solely off its own legend. There is the energy of „Spreading the Disease” and „Among the Living”, the melodic instinct of the later Belladonna era, the weight of the band’s ’90s experiences, and several ideas that sound fresh even by Anthrax’s own standards. The title speaks of completing a journey, yet the closing „My Victory” does not leave us with the image of an empty stage and fading lights. It feels more like a band that has reached a point from which it can see the entire road behind it – and then decides to plug the amps in one more time. If „Cursum Perficio” does turn out to be Anthrax’s final album, it would make for a worthy closing chapter. If not, all the better, because there is more than enough here to make the next one worth waiting for. Quite simply, this is a very good album: perhaps not a new monument in the Anthrax discography, but unquestionably much more than a merely solid comeback after a decade away.

 

Szymon Pęczalski