Two weeks ago, heavy metal legends Iron Maiden released Senjutsu, their 17th studio album. The record has been met with acclaim by millions of rock fans, who desperately needed the healing balm of fun-ass heavy metal after the year they’d had. And apparently, these fans also voted with their dollar, as it’s now been revealed that the album is Iron Maiden’s highest-charting album of all time in the United States.
According to Billboard, Senjutsu debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 chart. This comes after landing at #4 with their previous two releases, 2015’s The Book of Souls and 2010’s The Final Frontier. Of Senjutsu’s 64,000 equivalent album units earned, album sales comprise 61,000 (making it the top-selling album of the week), SEA units comprise 3,000 (equaling 3.57 million on-demand streams of the set’s 10 tracks) and TEA units comprise a negligible sum.
Congratulations to the dudes in Maiden for breaking their own record this far into their careers!
A huge part of Senjutsu’s roll-out was Iron Maiden’s massive video reveal for the track “The Writing On The Wall.” Apparently, Maiden got the idea to drop such a sprawling piece of art from a somewhat surprising source: German industrial metallers Rammstein. In a recent interview, frontman Bruce Dickinson said, “I said to Rod [Smallwood, Maiden manager], ‘Have you seen the video for ‘Deutschland’ by Rammstein?’ That, to me, is a groundbreaking video. That’s astonishing. Now, I’m not suggesting we do that, because we’re not Rammstein. But think of what we could do that would have the equivalent impact for us. So, I wrote storyboard for the vid, tweaked it a little bit, and gave it a happy ending.
“Well, kind of a happy ending – Adam and Eve start again, but with Eddie going, ‘I’ll still get you in the end.’”
Check out Iron Maiden’s video for “The Writing On The Wall” below:
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Words by Chris Krovatin
