Album Review: The Damned – Evil Spirits

The Damned‘s musical journey has seen the quintet intent on moving forward, courageously exploring sights and sounds way beyond their brash wide-eyed beginnings, always unpredictable with each subsequent album shifting into a new direction and embracing new influences, and now they’re back to do it all over again. The Damned are set to release their first new new album in a decade with the brand new ten track album, Evil Spirits, that will be unleashed on Friday 13th April via Search And Destroy Records and Spinefarm Records. The Damned’s latest full length is now available for pre-order on vinyl, CD and streaming and digital formats.

The album’s lead single, Standing On The Edge Of Tomorrow, hinted at the direction that Evil Spirits would take with a distinctly psychedelic feel, this continues with The Devil In Disguise which features some heavy Farfisa keyboards that keeps the heady garage and psych influences to the fore, and every track on Evil Spirits continues to have a lush and dramatic sixties feel that’s imbued by the skills of legendary producer Tony Visconti. Evil Spirits is an album that will be appeal to fans of the The Damned‘s more psychedelic leanings, it falls short of recapturing their glory years when they delivered three classic albums, Damned Damned Damned, Machine Gun Etiquette and The Black Album, in the space of four years, but having said that it’s a worthy addition to their back catalogue.

Evil Spirits fits into The Damned‘s eclectic collection of recordings perfectly, in so much as it’s gone off at a completely different tangent from their last full length, So, Who’s Paranoid?. The Damned have never been shy about their love of sixties pop music, garage and psychedelia, a look at the tracks they’ve chosen to cover over the years, ranging from The MC5 and The Stooges to Love and Barry Ryan, but with the release of Evil Spirits it seems that The Damned have released their most open love letter to their influences since they released Give Daddy The Knife Cindy, an album of garage covers recorded under the moniker of Naz Nomad And The Nightmares.

Evil Spirits can be pre-ordered here

The Damned‘s official website can be found here