After a month or so of cryptic, online, and ground teases (flyers and posters), Iron Maiden recently announced that they will be releasing their 17th album Senjutsu, a double album. Before I go any further, let me be 100% honest here. The idea of yet another double album has me feeling a bit nervous.
When Iron Maiden released The Final Frontier in 2010, the band’s highest charting US release to date peaked at #4. The album didn’t get a tremendous amount of love, but I honestly felt that it was their best release since 1988’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. The band did a brilliant “album tour,” concentrating on the newer material, and I thought the songs were fantastic. The title track, “Coming Home,” and “The Alchemist,” to name a few, were some of Maiden’s best compositions, and as a whole, the album was a total home run.
Iron Maiden returned in 2015 with the double album The Book of Souls, and much like its predecessor, had the band peaking at #4 on the US charts making the album a huge success for Maiden. Critics and some fans praised the album as being their best album in decades. However, I had to disagree with this sentiment.
Releasing a double album was overly indulgent and resulted in a bloated album with some drab filler tracks. However, if you shave the fat off of The Book of Souls (“The Red and the Black,” “Death or Glory,” and “Tears of a Clown”), you would have ONE stellar Iron Maiden album that very well could’ve been as good if not better than The Final Frontier. I’m sure opinions vary on what songs are considered “filler,” but if anyone would call this a perfect Maiden album, they need to go back home and see the hearing doctor and say, “Doctor. I think my hearing is fucked up for good.”
Well, here we are. It’s 2021, and we have been gifted a brand new Iron Maiden song called “The Writing On the Wall.” The album is called Senjutsu, which translates into “tactics and strategy.” It can also refer to skill, technique, trick, resources, and magic. The first single off of the album, “The Writing on the Wall,” was released with an accompanying video. It’s a mind-blowing animated adventure clip full of easter eggs of many past Iron Maiden images.
I was so impressed with this song. The acoustic intro completely caught me off guard, and the song itself is killer. “The Writing on the Wall” is a throwback to classic Iron Maiden but in a perfect way. It’s classic Iron Maiden in 2021, and I couldn’t be any happier. As for the rest of the album, I’m a bit nervous. The album clocks in at just under 82 minutes with ten songs. That being said, a double album (actually three LPs) is a bit much. However, Bruce Dickinson did have this to say about the album:
?“We’re all really excited about this album. We recorded it back in early 2019 during a break in the Legacy tour so we could maximize our touring yet still have a long set-up period before release to prepare great album art and something special as a video. But, of course, the pandemic delayed things more – so much for the best-laid plans – or should that be ?‘strategies’!? The songs are very varied, and some of them are quite long. There’s also one or two songs which sound pretty different to our usual style, and I think Maiden fans will be surprised – in a good way, I hope!”
I hope I will be surprised in a good way, Bruce. But, honestly, if I have to predict, this album will not be perfect. It will have some filler, and it could probably have been just ONE fantastic album. But, until Senjutsu is released on September 3rd, I will enjoy this new song and looking forward to new music from the greatest metal band in the fucking galaxy. So, up the irons, y’all!
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