Deep Purple – ‘Splat!’ album review: assaulting, commanding, unmissable
There’s something inherently intriguing about hearing a new album by Deep Purple in the grand old year that is 2026.
The Skinny: That’s not just because I got somewhat of an inside scoop by interviewing the band’s long-serving bassist, Roger Glover, about how the process of this record unfolded. But there’s something about Splat! that does intrinsically feel like a slap across the chops, in all its blazing prog rock glory.
As a 24th studio effort, you could be mistaken for thinking that Deep Purple, now largely in their 80s, are just doing this for the sake of it. But even the briefest of listens would have you proven wrong. This is Ian Gillan wearing his mad scientist hat, taking over the entirety of his lair to come up with his latest intoxicating concoction.
That is a rather long way of saying that the course of Splat! is rather unknowable to those outside of the frontman’s brain, which, to an extent, also includes his own bandmates. From the very opening blitz of the lead single ‘Arrogant Boy’, there must be something very wrong with you if you are able to tune out that blistering sound.
Nothing about the album is pared-back or subtle. It throttles through on maximum volume at all times, making silence sound oddly foreign if you take a moment of pause. Between ‘Diablo’, ‘The Lunatic’ and ‘My New Movie’, there’s an incessant intensity that never lets up, between sizzling sonics and mind-melting guitar riffs that seem like they would have been painstaking to record.
In this sense, it’s a direct time portal back to the prog height of the 1970s, and if that’s your true jam, then knock yourself out. It’s what Deep Purple have always been, and that even encompasses the likes of the dizzyingly perplexing ‘The Only Horse in Town’, which lyrically charts a conversation between a man and a horse. Obviously.
It’s the mark of a band who set out the stall of who they were going to be a long time ago now, and you can’t really argue with that logic. Gillan has combined his zany approach with life as he knows it as an 80-year-old, with ‘Scriblin’ Gib’rish’ decrying the inaccessibility of the modern technological world, and ‘Jessica’s Bra’ being named as such due to an unfortunate misspelling of the word ‘bar’.
Standout Track: ‘The Only Horse in Town’
The Verdict: Splat! is hardly an album that the kids are going to be lapping up for their next TikTok trend – not, by the sounds of it, like Gillan and the rest of the band would really know what that means. The lyrics aren’t always that astute, and the overall sound barely gives you a moment to breathe. But it’s a classic rock band having fun, and truly, the world needs more of that.
Release Date: July 3rd, 2026 | Producer: Bob Ezrin | Label: earMusic
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