When a band first convened in 1968 and has since shifted more than 120 million albums, the arrival of a new long-player can feel less like event and more like the quiet confirmation of an enduring geological seam. Deep Purple's Splat!, released on 3 July via earMUSIC, does something rarer. It sounds like the group remembering exactly why the seam was worth mining in the first place.
Produced by Bob Ezrin, this sixth collaboration between band and producer is billed by the musicians themselves as their heaviest effort in many years. The claim is not idly made. Across 13 tracks totalling roughly 50 minutes the current line-up, Ian Gillan on vocals, Simon McBride on guitar, Roger Glover on bass, Ian Paice on drums and Don Airey on keyboards, lean into the sort of dynamics that once powered Machine Head and its immediate neighbours. McBride, now on his second album with the group, slots in with the sort of flinty authority that suggests the transition from the late Ritchie Blackmore and Steve Morse eras has been less rupture than continuation by other means.
The singles rolled out in advance, Arrogant Boy in mid-May, Diablo at the beginning of June and Guilt Trippin' a fortnight later, already hinted at the record's priorities. Keith Urban adds guitar to the second of those, a detail that on paper looks like opportunistic guesting but in practice feels like one more layer of texture in a production that refuses to settle for nostalgia alone.
I have to say, now we are very much back in with material that is compatible with ‘Highway Star’, ‘Smoke on the Water’, ‘Lazy’ – the dynamics, the balance, and the fun of the music we made from ‘69 to ‘73.
Ian Gillan offered that observation in the album's official description, and the remark carries the dry satisfaction of a man who has watched several cycles of fashion come and go. The music does not mimic those early tracks note for note. Instead it borrows their internal tension, the way riff, organ swell and vocal phrasing seemed to argue with one another before suddenly locking into something inevitable. Here the argument is conducted with the benefit of five decades of accumulated craft. The result is heavier without being lumbering, familiar without sliding into self-parody.
Threaded through the record is a loose conceptual thread about the end of humanity. Gillan is careful to frame it in the liner notes as something other than crude apocalypse.
Not in any crude apocalyptic sense but as a metamorphosis beyond physical existence.
That distinction matters. It prevents the lyrics from tipping into either doom-mongering or New Age vagueness, leaving the music free to supply its own commentary through sheer physical force. The transformation imagined here feels closer to alchemy than extinction, the sort of sonic transmutation that classic British hard rock has always performed better than most.
