UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS @ Razzmatazz 2, Barcelona / June 14, 2026 | w/ Dirty Sound Magnet

It was still daylight when I arrived. Guto was already inside watching Dirty Sound Magnet. I didn’t give him time to say whether they were good or not… we headed straight to the smoking area, lit one up, and stood under a Barcelona sky full of seagulls and zero clouds. A golden late afternoon. I sometimes forget I live in a beach city.

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats is a mandatory show for fans of heavy, psychedelic, and garage music. Especially if you have a thing for horror films. The band is spending 2026 dominating European stages (Hellfest, Graspop, Roskilde, Desertfest), and North American, as one of the headliners of Levitation in Austin in September, where they’ll share a night with Sleep. A band in full motion.

The house was full. Good to see the older heads, the newer converts, even a few who looked like they’d wandered in from somewhere else entirely. When the show started, everyone headbanged like slow waves breaking on the shore. Some followed the bass, some the drums, others were playing every note in their heads. All on the same frequency.

This is what good metal does. It creates communion without asking for it.

Kevin Starrs is the elder of this ritual. The conductor and spirit behind the project since it began. His mixes of riffs, drones, weight, and psychedelia contrast with a thin, cavernous vocal: hollow and heavy at once, somehow. Live, it sounds somewhere between Ozzy and John Lennon, which shouldn’t work but does. He was flanked by keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Burnett, whose layers added exactly the depth the material needed live without softening the edges.

The thing is: we barely know them. Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats play in near-total darkness, backlit into silhouettes. No faces. No social media presence worth mentioning. Starrs has given almost no interviews in almost 20 years of releasing records. In an era where every band posts their lunch, their rehearsals, their feelings about their own feelings, this band is essentially a rumour with a discography. It works. The music fills the space that a personality would normally occupy.

They carry every major metal cliché. The clothes, the solos, the staging… right up to the edge of good taste, then stop. Nothing tips into cheesy. Everything works. This is the band I’d recommend to anyone curious about heavy music but not sure where to start: all the iconography, none of the embarrassment. Cool as fuck without trying to prove it.

The 12-song set was a statement. After the synth-driven-audio-film-Ítalo-experimental detour of Nell’ Ora Blu (2024), this felt like a deliberate return. No projections, no theatrics. Just amplifiers pushed to the limit and a room that understood exactly what was being asked of it.

The setlist came heavily on the gritty noir of The Night Creeper, included the live debut of their new single “Don’t Let It Control You”, and closed with the monolithic “I’ll Cut You Down.”

I went in expecting the band’s characteristic sonic unity… you’ve heard one album and liked it, you’ll like them all (again: with Nell’ Ora Blu as the only real outlier). Live, they’re a different thing. More prolific in their references, more alive in their range. Psychedelia to garage, Dick Dale to Iron Maiden, as Guto noted mid-set. He was right.

I left like someone leaving a pajelança. Altered. Same person.

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Recorded on iPhone. Unedited.

Selvagem Ritual — visual documentation from Grande Escape.

What moves. What survives.