Iron Maiden will resume their 'Legacy of the Beast' tour later this year, but the metal legends are peering beyond these upcoming dates and may eventually perform their new record, Senjutsu, in it's entirety at a later time, as suggested recently by Bruce Dickinson.

The 10-track, 82-minute album was released on Sept. 3, and since Maiden had to reschedule 'Legacy of the Beast' tour dates due to the pandemic, they haven't been able to book a proper tour in support of the album like they typically do. Fans can still expect to hear a couple tracks off the band's 17th full length on this year's tour, but if Dickinson is to be believed, a lot more is coming later on.

"The plan we've got — it's not really a secret; I think everybody else has chatted about it — we will, I hope, we've talked about doing the entire [Senjutsu] album start to finish, but not this time around," the singer said (transcription via Blabbermouth) on the Talk Is Jericho podcast hosted by AEW superstar and Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho.

Dickinson understood that the full album set may not be the most attractive concert option for fans and noted, "And we all appreciate that that is something that really diehard fans will probably love and other people will go, 'Hmmm, I'm not going to go see that.' So the answer is you play smaller venues so that they sell out with just your diehard fans. Because it's a musical thing to do — it's a musical thing."

"Nobody has to buy a ticket," cautioned Dickinson when Jericho broached the topic of when Iron Maiden played all of their 2006 album A Matter of Life and Death on the road. "If you don't wanna go [see us play an entire new album live], you don't buy a ticket. It's going to be plain as the nose on your face. This is going to be what they're gonna do. So given that, don't complain that they did what they said they were going to do," he continued.

Speaking with Loudwire recently, Dickinson discussed the dilemma at hand with having to navigate a pre-existing tour production with a new album. "We can't change the tour that much because they've all paid their money to go and see the 'Legacy of the Beast' show and it is a great show. We're going to keep all of our Spitfires, flamethrowers, Icarus, graveyards, London, loads of Eddies... Of course, [there] are at least two [Eddies] now, because we got a samurai Eddie to come on," he said.

Dickinson then forecasted, "We're not going to subject people to more than two or three songs from the new album. [We'll] probably do them at the beginning. Obviously, 'The Writing on the Wall' everybody knows, a title track [is one] we [have] got to do — 'Senjutsu' is a fantastic opening song."

See Iron Maiden's upcoming North American tour dates here and, before that tour kicks off, catch Dickinson on his spoken word run in the U.S. and Canada starting Jan. 17 at these stops.

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