Metal
Killer Candy Records · 18 September 2026
“House by the Grave” opens with six and three-quarter minutes of dragging riff and Kevin Starrs’ vocal doubled and soaked in reverb, and that register runs the whole eight tracks. Shapes of Midnight is Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats’ seventh album and the first they have put out themselves since Blood Lust. The label is their own, and it is called Killer Candy Records.
It was cut at Abbey Road in three days, on the late-sixties desks the studio still keeps, with microphones from the fifties and sixties and room mics to catch the air. You hear it most in the keyboards: “When Evil Wakes” comes in on a Farfisa-toned organ and the guitar answers with blues phrasing, without the garage grime the band has never been without.
Rachel Burnett’s saxophone is the clearest new element. On “I Won’t Sleep (‘Til You’re Gone)” it shadows the verses and then takes the ending outright, and the track lands as a seventies glam shuffle carrying the weight of a doom record. Starrs says that on another song he took a discarded sax take, reversed it and left it at the end — and it changed the finish he had written.
“Psycho on the Loose” is the one place where the synths work under the song rather than coating it, and “Sleep No More” closes with a slow blues shuffle and a spoken part in a distorted voice. Starrs says he was after a ZZ Top groove.
Six of the eight tracks run past five minutes and the sequence hardly lets up: “Don’t Let It Control You”, at three and three-quarter minutes, is the one that breaks stride, and “The Other Side of the Sky” does not reach five either. Take the saxophone out and everything here is ground already covered: after Nell’ Ora Blu (2024), this one heads back to that of The Night Creeper (2015) and Wasteland (2018), and the dragging riff and reverb-soaked vocal of the opening track are the same across all eight.
Eight tracks, forty-five minutes. The story is a plague that takes everyone while the ruling class shuts itself away; Starrs says he recognised Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in it only once he had written it. It came out on 18 September, right before the North American tour.
Rating: 8/10
Text by Roger Estivill