ANTHRAX Trivia — 16 Entries
16 sourced facts about ANTHRAX.
Trivia
The title of the band's twelfth album reached drummer Charlie Benante through a documentary about Marilyn Monroe. The camera showed the Latin phrase Cursum Perficio set into a tile at the last house she lived in; once he looked up what it meant, it fit. The label's announcement glosses the phrase as "my journey has come to an end," "my journey is over," or "I complete my journey." Benante has been careful about what that does and does not mean: it marks a road travelled to its end, not the band announcing it is finished.
Cursum Perficio was meant to be made in 2020. It was not, and the band only dug into recording in earnest in 2022, working out of Dave Grohl's Studio 606 in Los Angeles. Production is credited to Jay Ruston together with Anthrax. Scott Ian's account of the gap is unglamorous rather than dramatic: once the pandemic had passed and they could be a band again, simply being in the same room to start work was the good part.
Cursum Perficio is dated September 18, 2026, and arrives on two labels: Megaforce Records in North America and Nuclear Blast Records elsewhere. It is the band's twelfth studio album, and their first new record in a decade — the previous one, 2016's For All Kings, entered the Billboard 200 inside the Top 10. The line-up named in the announcement is Scott Ian (guitar), Charlie Benante (drums), Frank Bello (bass), Joey Belladonna (vocals) and Jonathan Donais (guitar).
The 1991 Public Enemy collaboration on "Bring the Noise" was Scott Ian's doing, and he ran it without telling his own singer. Joey Belladonna heard the riff during rehearsals for Persistence of Time, liked it, asked what it was and was brushed off; the next thing he knew, Chuck D and Flavor Flav were in the studio. He says he had not even heard the original song until afterwards. The two bands first sized each other up at Conway Studios in Hollywood. Anthrax were not starting cold — they had already put a toe into rap-inflected material with 1987's "I'm the Man."
On the band's third album, both the title and the cover art trace back to a single novel: Stephen King's The Stand. The two things a listener meets before hearing a note — the name and the image — come from the same book.
"I Am the Law" takes its subject from Judge Dredd, the character from the British comic 2000AD. It and "Indians" were both in the live set well before the album existed — the band were already playing them on the Spreading the Disease tour. "I Am the Law" also carries older musical ideas left behind by the band's first bassist, Dan Lilker, who had a hand in "Imitation of Life" on the same record. The division of labour was the one they had used since the start: Charlie Benante wrote most of the music, Scott Ian the words.
Anthrax hired Eddie Kramer — Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix — to produce Among the Living, specifically for the raw quality of his 1970s work and specifically to avoid the heavily-layered production that was fashionable in the mid-80s. The first mix he handed back did the opposite: reverb piled onto the vocals, guitars washed out, the band sounding to their own ears like Def Leppard. The arguments that followed were furious, but replacing him was never discussed, and Scott Ian's verdict years later is that the friction is audible — it pushed them to play faster and harder. The album was cut over six weeks at Quad Radial Studios in Miami and mixed at Compass Point in the Bahamas.
The term "thrash metal" is credited to a journalist who was writing about Anthrax. In its own author biography, Louder (Metal Hammer) states that Malcolm Dome is credited with coining the phrase in 1984, in a piece about the Anthrax song "Metal Thrashing Mad." Dome died in 2021; the Scott Ian interview this site draws on for Among the Living is also his work.
For the album's first single, "It's For The Kids," Scott Ian set out to write a four-minute thrash song that reached back to the band's earliest era. The video reaches back too: it was built deliberately as a callback to "Madhouse," the first video Anthrax ever made. Fans took part in the shoot, and Charlie Benante — who says he does not particularly enjoy making videos — singles out watching those fans hear the song for the first time as the thing that made this one worth doing.
Scott Ian places the new album alongside 1987's Among the Living, but the way he frames it is a chain rather than a comparison. Fistful of Metal and Spreading the Disease had to exist before Among the Living could be written; in the same way, he argues, Worship Music and For All Kings had to exist before Cursum Perficio could. He is describing the record as an accumulation, not a departure.
The "Bring the Noise" video was shot in downtown Chicago in front of a crowd that was mixed by design — metal fans and hip-hop fans in the same room. In July 1991 the Anthrax version reached No. 14 in the UK chart, and that success turned into a co-headline tour by the two bands. Chuck D later described the video as a real gamble: there was a live possibility that hip-hop listeners would read it as Public Enemy selling out to metal, and that metal listeners would ask Anthrax what they were doing with rap.
Among the Living peaked at No. 18 in the UK and No. 62 in the US, and went on to sell well past half a million copies in America alone. The American placing is the lower of the two, but Scott Ian's assessment of the record is not measured in chart positions: he says it did not merely mark an important moment in the band's career, it gave them one.
The title "Efilnikufesin (N.F.L.)" is an in-band catchphrase spelled backwards — the members said it constantly at the time. Reversing it was Charlie Benante's idea, and the motive was practical: printed the right way round, the song would never have been played on radio. What sits under the wordplay is not a joke. The song is about the comedian John Belushi and what addiction did to him. Scott Ian says writers still turn up assuming the parenthesis refers to American football.
"Indians" is routinely assumed to descend from Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills," and Scott Ian rejects that reading outright. What set him off, by his own account, was a Time magazine piece about reservations — the scale of the drink and drug problems there, and a suicide rate that shocked him. He is happy to grant that Anthrax owe Maiden a great deal musically. Lyrically, he says, is a separate question.
The time the band spent making records varied wildly in the early years. By Scott Ian's count, the debut Fistful of Metal took three weeks from start to finish; Spreading the Disease took six months. Part of what stretched the second album had nothing to do with recording — they were looking for a singer, and it was during this stretch that Joey Belladonna came in to replace the band's original vocalist, Neil Turbin. Spreading the Disease was effectively self-produced, with help from Carl Canedy, drummer of the New York band The Rods.
The success of Among the Living put Anthrax on the bill at Donington in 1987. Scott Ian's recollection is that the phrase "the Big Four of thrash" came into use around the same stretch, though he hedges on the timing. His explanation is straightforward: Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer were all roughly the same age and at roughly the same point in their careers, at the moment the style itself broke through.