Bruce Dickinson has revealed Iron Maiden's new record isn't a "concept album".
Bruce Dickinson
The iconic metal band typically have a thread running trough their albums, but their 17th studio collection 'Senjutsu' - which dropped last week and is their first in almost six years - but any "connections" through this one weren't a conscious decision.
Joining Remy Maxwell for an 'Audacy Check In', Bruce explained: "Other than the cover concept, the album is not a concept album, any connections that people make are purely things that we happened to be feeling at the time; where we might have been in some kind of weird zeitgeist that we didn't even know we were in."
The frontman noted that the band feel they've crafted a "diverse" album which does a good job of taking fans on a journey through their musical evolution.
He added: "The new record is unleashed... We've actually got a couple of tunes on there, like 'Darkest Hour' which comes in around seven minutes or something like that.
"There's a lot of intro and outro - which is effectively seagulls and waves washing up on a beach.
"Even the same for 'Writing on the Wall', that's a lot shorter than the version on YouTube appears.
"There's a varied bunch of songs on the record — a trip through all the kinds of styles that the band has embraced over the last 40 years."
And first single 'Writing on the Wall' was an easy choice to be fans' first real taste of the record once bassist Steve Harris made the suggestion.
Bruce said: "'Writing on the Wall' that is a little bit left field for us... The concept of the video, once we decided that that was going to be the opening track, we thought it was a fairly catchy tune, a bit more conventional than we normally do.
"Steve [Harris] really loved it, and said that's got to be the first track, and we were like okay, cool."
Watch Bruce Dickinson's full 'Audacy Check In' here: audacy.com/music/rock/watch-our-audacy-check-in-with-iron-maiden-bruce-dickinson
Tagged in Bruce Dickinson Iron Maiden