The Book of Souls
2015 studio album by Iron Maiden
The Book of Souls is the sixteenth studio album by English heavy metal band Iron Maiden, released on 4 September 2015. It is the band's first studio double album on CD (their first studio double LP being Fear of the Dark in 1992); it is also their longest album to date, with a total length of 92 minutes and 11 seconds. Its launch and supporting tour were delayed to allow vocalist Bruce Dickinson time to recover from the removal of a cancerous tumour in early 2015. It is also their first album to be released on Parlophone, since the end of their 30-year relationship with EMI Records.
Produced by long-time Iron Maiden collaborator Kevin Shirley, The Book of Souls was recorded at Guillaume Tell Studios, Paris from September to December 2014, which they had previously used for 2000's Brave New World. The band wrote and immediately recorded many tracks in the studio, resulting in a spontaneous live feel. The album's first single, "Speed of Light", was issued as a music video on 14 August, and simultaneously as a digital download and CD single exclusive to Best Buy. In addition to being their longest studio record, it also contains the band's longest song to date, "Empire of the Clouds", at 18 minutes in length, which was also issued as a single for Record Store Day on 16 April 2016. While not a concept album, references to the soul and mortality are prominent, realised in the Maya-themed cover artwork, created by Mark Wilkinson.
A critical and commercial success, The Book of Souls topped the album charts in 24 countries.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Book of Souls” is 2015 studio album by Iron Maiden. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Book, Souls and studio, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20155876. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015, 1992, 2014 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Book of Souls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.