There’s something refreshingly timeless about Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats. Whilst fads and trends come and go (and with increasing rapidity), Uncle Acid & Co. have stayed true to their original vision, seemingly impervious to the corrosive nature of time. Ever since the band burst out of vocalist/guitarist Kevin R. Starr’s garage in 2009, the band have stayed true to their blood-curdling sound, releasing a series of albums that capture a moment in time when the Summer Of Love turned into the bad acid, Altamont-inspired nightmare. With foot hard on the distortion pedal their latest album, Shapes Of Midnight, serves up eight tracks that are the perfect summation of the band’s sound and perfectly illustrate why good music will never go out of style.

With their love of bands and musical equipment from a bygone era, it would be easy for the uninitiated to write off Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats some kind of retro act, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst opening track ‘House By The Grave’ might sound like the illicit love child of the Alice Cooper Band and Black Sabbath, it has a drive and energy that places it firmly in the present. With a riff that swings like Norman Bates’ knife ‘House By The Grave’ would (like most of this album) make the perfect soundtrack to some über-cool horror film and will fill your cranium with visions of haunted mansions and moonlit cemeteries. In fact, no matter how bright the sun might be shining outside, with Shapes Of Midnight on your stereo a dark shadow will be cast; it’s the musical equivalent of a solar eclipse. It is this dark aesthetic which stitches their diverse discography together and it is the thread that also runs through Shapes Of Midnight.

Despite my earlier protestations that Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats are a contemporary force (and they are), there’s no denying that they are manna from heaven for those with a penchant for that early (proto) metal sound. The riffage on the title track recalls Iron Butterfly at their most expansive and is pretty much unstoppable, whilst the fuzzed-up soloing on the same track is the stuff of Tony Iommi’s dreams and will have you breaking out the air guitar. As with Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (or even Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’) it feels dangerous playing Shapes Of Midnight, as if the very act of spinning tracks such as ‘When Evil Wakes’ and ‘Psycho On The Loose’ is enough to summon the Goat Of Mendes.

Shapes Of Midnight has a production that pushes the needles as close to the red as possible, without ever stepping over the line into full on distortion. That’s a pretty good analogy for this album; Shapes Of Midnight walks on a knife’s edge, ‘I Won’t Sleep (‘til You’re Gone’ and closer ‘Sleep No More’, and they balance on that precipice precariously, without quite toppling over into the abyss. It is from here that the album gets it sense of danger, but good rock music should never be safe.

• Shapes Of Midnight is released via Killer Candy Records on 18th September 2026.

Track List:

1. House By The Grave
2. Shapes Of Midnight
3. When Evil Wakes
4. Don’t Let It Control You
5. Psycho On The Loose
6. I Won’t Sleep (‘til You’re Gone
7. The Other Side Of The Sky
8. Sleep No More