Anthrax put drummer London May through the wringer in the Cursum Perficio video

Anthrax have put out the video for Cursum Perficio, the title track of the album that arrives on Friday 18 September and their first record in more than a decade. The man taking the punishment in it is London May, once the bassist and drummer of Samhain, who spends the clip being dragged through dirt, smoke and water on the end of a chain.

The look is the point. Don Argott, a documentary director whose credits take in Lamb of God's As the Palaces Burn and a co-directing role on Taylor Swift's The End of an Era, shot the whole thing in black and white, closer to a short film than a band video. Metal Injection, which carried the premiere, described the band as enjoying the torture rather more than was strictly necessary.

It was not entirely acting. "That was real chain and real pain," May told Rolling Stone, saying he broke his finger on the very first day and had to beg the crew to keep shooting. He added that he would happily do it again.

Scott Ian, who writes most of the band's lyrics, tied the imagery to what the song is asking. He framed the lyric as a set of questions about measuring a life: how do you quantify it, how do you measure oceans of time, and were the struggles worth it at the end. Drummer Charlie Benante called the song the dark horse of the record and said the video matches its tone, which is a fairly pointed thing to say about a track the band chose to name the album after.

Anthrax had already previewed the record with Everybody's Got a Plan, a more conventional single, so the title track landing two days before release as a heavily art-directed black and white piece reads as the band setting the frame they want the album heard in. It follows a run of metal acts putting real money and real directors behind clips again, after years of lyric videos, and sits alongside the likes of Signs of the Swarm's cameo-stuffed Dragula cover video on the same release week.

The band are on the road around it. They played Louder Than Life in Louisville on the day the video went up, and follow it with two nights at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles on 25 and 27 September supporting Iron Maiden, the Alamodome in San Antonio on 29 September, and Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City on 2 October to close the run. Release dates for the record and the rest of the autumn sit on the release calendar.