Anthrax have returned to the top of Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart with Cursum Perficio. The album enters at No. 1 on the ranking dated October 3, becoming the band’s second leader after For All Kings in 2016.
According to Billboard, the record earned 22,000 equivalent album units in the United States during the week ending September 24. Album sales accounted for 21,000 of those units. It also opens at No. 27 on the Billboard 200.
Released September 18 through Megaforce in North America and Nuclear Blast internationally, Cursum Perficio is Anthrax’s twelfth studio album. The decade between records was considerably longer than the band initially intended. Scott Ian said they had planned to make the album in 2020, before the pandemic disrupted the process.
When the musicians could work together again, simply sharing a room became part of what drove the sessions. “When we started working on the record, we were just happy to be in a room together,” Ian said in the album announcement. He described the music as carrying both the fear of having their lives interrupted and the excitement of reconnecting.
Anthrax produced the album with Jay Ruston and recorded much of it at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in Los Angeles. It was their third album with Ruston, continuing the working relationship behind Worship Music and For All Kings. Ian has described those two records as necessary steps toward writing Cursum Perficio.
The material also reflects experiences from the years between releases. Ian wrote “The Long Goodbye” about his father, who died in 2024 after living with dementia. “The Edge of Perfection” drew on his feelings about his wife and son, and the awareness that the life he values could be damaged by his own decisions.
The album’s release was accompanied by a video for “Cursum Perficio,” directed by Don Argott and starring musician and actor London May. Shot in black and white, the clip follows the title track’s questions about time, struggle and how someone measures the life they have lived.
That concern with reaching an endpoint also shaped the album’s name. Charlie Benante discovered the Latin phrase while watching a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, whose final home featured the words on a tile. He connected its meaning to the work Anthrax had finally completed. In the album announcement, Benante explained that the title referred to finishing that journey and did not establish Cursum Perficio as their final record.
