Iron Maiden and rapper Drake are fighting it out in a battle for the number one spot on this week’s Official Albums Chart.
At this very moment (Sept 08), Bruce Dickinson and co. are in the lead on physical sales and downloads with their 17th studio album Senjutsu, while rapper Drake is pushing forward with more streams with his LP Certified Lover Boy.
Between the two artists, there's 8,000 sales separating the pair of albums, so it's all still to play for.
As a final push for sales, Senjutsu will be available to download for £4.99 via Amazon or iTunes for the next 24 hours. There's also a good selection of decent physical offers, all available on the band's website. Rockers, you know what to do.
Across their forty year career, Iron Maiden have scored a total of five UK Number Ones, with their latest two studio albums, 2010's Final Frontier and 2015's The Book of Souls, serving as their first consecutive wins.
Recently, it was revealed that Iron Maiden refused to allow themselves to listen to Senjutsu for two whole years, in fear of it being leaked online. Speaking exclusively to Metal Hammer for their cover story on the British heavy metal legends, frontman Bruce Dickinson explained that the new album was actually "locked up in a vault" for the duration.
Dickinson recalls, "At the ending of the recording, everybody else had fucked off home, so it was basically me, Steve [Harris] and Kevin in the studio. 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.”
He 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 was released on September 3 via Parlophone Records. For more exclusive insights into the making of the new album from Dickinson and Maiden guitarist Janick Gers, pick up the new issue of Metal Hammer, which is on-sale now. The issue also features new interviews with Alien Weaponry, Employed To Serve, Carcass, Health, Dordeduh, Between The Buried And Me and much, much more.
