According to singer Bruce Dickinson, IRON MAIDEN avoided listening to their forthcoming album, ‘Senjutsu’, out of fear of it leaking online ahead of its September release date.
Speaking to Metal Hammer for their cover story on IRON MAIDEN’s forthcoming seventeenth studio album, Dickinson reveals that ‘Senjutsu’ was “locked up in a vault’ for the best part of two years, to keep it safe from potential online leaks.
“At the ending of the recording, everybody else had fucked off home, so it was basically me, Steve [Harris] and Kevin in the studio,” Bruce recalls. “We played it back a couple of times, said, ‘Yeah, that’s alright then!’ and then that was the last time I heard it or nearly two years. All of us! Nobody in the band had a copy! Steve, in
particular, was so paranoid that someone would leak it onto the internet, and probably with some justification, it was locked up in a vault.”
Dickinson continues, “The next time I heard the album was when we were mixing the Mexico live stuff [2020’s live album, Nights Of The Dead]. I went round to Steve’s, and I said, ‘You haven’t got a copy of the album, have you?’ and he said, ‘I think it’s on my laptop!’ And he had only played it a couple of times. He hadn’t heard it for ages either, so we said, ‘Fuck it, put it on the big speakers!’ That was when I was thinking, ‘Shit a brick, this is good!’”
‘Senjutsu’ arrives on September 3 via Parlophone Records. The album was recorded back in the spring of 2019 in Paris with producer Kevin Shirley.
