Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats

By Ljós Berinn

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats aren't a band: they're a conjuring. Born in Cambridge in 2009 from the hands of Kevin Starrs, this entity has chosen the shadows as its home and fuzz as its language. Their sound is a ritual of sonic necromancy: riffs that sink into the mud of 1968, organs moaning like ghosts in a forgotten jukebox, voices whispering from an elsewhere that never existed. With Blood Lust (2011) the cult exploded, an album that won a status of rabid devotion among doom's worldwide brotherhood.

Since then, their discography has grown into an expanding grimoire: "Mind Control" (2013), The Night Creeper (2015), Wasteland (2018), through to "Nell'Ora Blu" (2024) and "Shapes of Midnight" (2026). Starrs, sole keeper of this world, uses vintage instruments to forge a sound that is both homage and desecration. They've played with Black Sabbath and taken the stages of Roadburn and Hellfest, but they've never sought the light. They prefer the darkness. And in that darkness, their music keeps pulsing: a black heart beating in the chest of an era that has never stopped dying.