Are Iron Maiden cryptically teasing a follow-up to 2015's The Book Of Souls? The internet certainly seems to think so…
You know how bands like Slipknot and twenty one pilots tend to get really, really cryptic when they're about to make a massive announcement? The internet seems to think that Iron Maiden are currently up to something similar – and that the band are possibly gearing up for a new record…
Of course, it's no secret that Maiden have been working on the follow-up to 2015's The Book Of Souls, with Bruce Dickinson confirming last October that they'd been "together a little bit in the studio". Adrian Smith, meanwhile, said in March 2021 that the band have got some "very, very exciting things in the pipeline".
But does this all equate to the imminent arrival of a proper new album? Well, Twitter user Jon Crowder / @stormbeard certainly seems to reckon so, helpfully gathering fun little nuggets of information together in one nice thread.
Jon starts off by pointing out that the tour poster for Iron Maiden's 2022 Legacy Of The Beast European run has the letters WOTW on – which sounds random, but could actually stand for 'Writing on the wall'.
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As an aside from that, Jon shows a screengrab from a recent Bruce interview on Sky News, in which the frontman is wearing a T-shirt that says 'Belshazzar's Feast' and has the same print as various mysterious posters that were up at last weekend's Download Pilot. Weird…
Only, maybe it's not. According to Jon and Wikipedia, Belshazzar's Feast is also known as 'the story of the writing on the wall'. So there we have WOTW again. On top of that, the poster (and possibly Bruce's shirt, although it's hard to tell) reads: IM XVII – which could also be read as IM 17, Maiden's 17th album. Whoa!
Finally, Jon points to Twitter account @bels_feast (whose name is actually Daniel) which follows 16 other accounts that are all (fairly loosely) linked to Maiden. We've also done some digging of our own and found that this particular Twitter account's header image is of St Mary Magdalene's Church in Waltham On The Wolds, which also has the initials of WOTW. Well then…
Check out the full thread below. Nice work, Jon!
Of course, this could all be a red herring, and the internet is getting overexcited. Watch this space for any more potential Maiden antics…
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