Rock and metal icons Iron Maiden have announced their 17th studio album Senjutsu, and first album of new material in six years, on September 3.

Recorded in Paris with longstanding producer Kevin Shirley and co-produced by Maiden founder member and bassist Steve Harris, the album announcement was preceded by the acclaimed animated video for the first single ‘The Writing On The Wall’, based on a concept by lead singerBruce Dickinson with two former Pixar executives.

Said Harris: “There’s some very complex songs on this album which took a lot of hard work to get them exactly as we wanted them to sound, so the process was at times very challenging, but Kevin is great at capturing the essence of the band and I think it was worth the effort! I’m very proud of the result and can’t wait for fans to hear it.”

Bruce Dickinson said, “We’re all really excited about this album. 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!”

Iron Maiden have over 100 million record sales, more than 2,000 live performances in 63 countries, millions of fans worldwide, and 16 top-class studio albums already under their belts – the most recent of which was 2015’s The Book Of Souls, their first-ever double studio album and most successful chart-wise to date, debuting at Number One in over 43 countries.

BMG has been working with Iron Maiden in the US since its acquisition of Sanctuary Records in 2013. Since then BMG has worked with the band to create a successful vinyl reissue campaign, a Mastered for iTunes campaign, and The Studio Collection – Remastered, a reissues series of the Iron Maiden catalog covering the band’s entire sixteen-strong studio albums across their career to date.

In Summer 2022 the band are due to resume the final leg of their Legacy Of The Beast world tour which began in 2018 and has since been taken around the world, playing to almost two million.

For Senjutsu – loosely translated as ‘tactics & strategy’ – the band once again enlisted the services of Mark Wilkinson to create the spectacular Samurai themed cover artwork, based on an idea by Steve Harris.