If you had May circled on your calendar for the new Anthrax album, grab a marker. September is the new target.
Drummer Charlie Benante confirmed the shift on Australia's Everblack podcast this week, straightforwardly correcting the assumption that the record would land in the spring. The delay isn't catastrophic — the album is recorded, finished, and apparently worth every second — but the wait just got longer.
"No, it doesn't come out in May," Benante said. "We're putting out our first song and video in May. The record is not coming out till September. We pushed it back a little bit. We just had to do a couple of other things to it. And then we had to, of course, get a release date set. So it got moved to September."
The good news: May still delivers something. The first single and its music video will drop as scheduled, giving fans their first proper taste of what Anthrax has been sitting on.
Why the Delay Happened
Benante's explanation was brief, and that's probably intentional. A few finishing touches, a release date that needed coordinating, and the logistics of bringing something this big to market without fumbling it. The band is releasing through Megaforce in North America and Nuclear Blast in Europe — two labels with different release cycles, international timelines, and promotional machinery to synchronize.
None of that is an excuse for 10 years between records. But it is a real constraint, and Benante didn't dramatize it. They had a couple things left to do. They did them. September it is.
What Benante Says It Sounds Like
If the delay is supposed to sting less based on the content, Benante is doing his part to sell it. He's been barely containing himself since the Canadian run with Megadeth and Exodus, where the band played a teaser snippet of one of the new songs during their set.
"I'm so excited about it. I'm so happy about it. This record is really, really good," he said. And then, referencing the Australian fans who'll see them in late March: "I could see us kind of expanding it a bit for our friends in Australia, maybe playing a little more, because, for me, it's become so hard to just contain this."
Scott Ian has used almost identical language. In a recent interview with The Rockpit, he described having "the most powerful weapon in the world" at his disposal and being unable to hold back his excitement: "I can't wait for people to hear it. And I know what we have." Guitarist and drummer aligned. That's not a PR talking point — that's a band that believes it made something.
Ten Years in Context
The gap between For All Kings (2016) and whatever this album will be called is hard to contextualize. Ian addressed it directly in his Rockpit interview, pointing out that the actual creative window — once touring for For All Kings wrapped in November 2019 and they restarted in 2021 — is closer to three years. COVID interrupted the first attempt. By any reasonable measure, the band spent about the same amount of time making this record that any other active band would.
None of that makes the wait feel shorter. But it explains how a band doesn't voluntarily disappear for a decade.
Bassist Frank Bello earlier this year called the album "so heavy" and said parts of it were physically challenging to play. Joey Belladonna's vocals, according to Bello, are "killing it" — the kind of thing a bandmate says when they know the singer is performing at a career-peak level. Jay Ruston is back at the helm, the same producer who helmed both Worship Music and For All Kings. Structural continuity, intentional not accidental.
What to Expect in May
The May single and video will be the first verifiable evidence of where this album actually lands. A single doesn't reveal a record, but it calibrates expectations. If it's a statement, if it plays like something recorded by a band with a decade's worth of energy banked, the September timeline becomes easier to accept.
Anthrax has been teasing snippets live — the Canadian run with Megadeth and Exodus, and now the Australian dates. The decision to drip it that way, in partial, live form before any official release, suggests they're confident it can stand up to live scrutiny before anyone's heard the studio version. That's not nothing.
September 2026. Mark it.
Pre-order the new Anthrax album on Amazon when it goes live, or check tour dates and tickets here.
