Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats have released Shapes of Midnight, out now through Killer Candy Records.
It follows Nell' Ora Blu from 2024, which was the furthest the band had taken a single idea: a concept record built out of Italian cinema and 1970s giallo, sung partly in Italian, closer to a soundtrack than to an album. Coming back from that is its own problem, and the new record is where Kevin Starrs answers it.
The band came out of Cambridge in 2009 with a sound assembled from the darker end of 1960s and 1970s rock, doom and psychedelia, and they have spent fifteen years refusing to sit still inside any one of those. Shapes of Midnight keeps the riffs heavy and the atmosphere vintage, which is the description the label gives it and also the only one that has ever fitted.