Deep Purple's 24th album 'SPLAT!' lands as one of the best-reviewed records of their late career

Deep Purple put out their 24th studio album, SPLAT!, on July 3 through earMUSIC, and the reviews landing alongside it are the kind most bands stop getting around album ten. Classic Rock called it "the very best Deep Purple one could possibly expect to hear in 2026." Ultimate Classic Rock heard a band "still in fierce form" as it closes in on its 60th anniversary. For a group that formed in 1968, that is not a sentence anyone was writing a decade ago.

The more interesting thing about SPLAT! is not that it exists. It is how short it is.

The Ezrin diet

This is the sixth Deep Purple album produced by Bob Ezrin, who has handled every record the band has made since 2013's Now What?!. His fingerprint by now is obvious: he edits. All 13 tracks here run under five minutes, most under four. A band whose reputation was built partly on stretching songs past the ten-minute mark ("Child in Time," the Made in Japan jams) now writes in tight, three-and-a-half-minute bursts and rarely wastes one.

That restraint is the whole pitch. Ian Fortnam, reviewing it for Classic Rock, framed Ezrin as the "often unsung hero" of latter-day Purple, a producer good at "steering stalled rock careers out of instinctively self-indulgent cult status." Where 2024's =1 proved the current lineup could still make a record worth hearing, SPLAT! tightens the screws further while letting some of the old Mark II and Mark III muscle back into the room.

An 80-year-old singer and a newish guitar player

The lineup carries some math. Ian Gillan is 80. Bassist Roger Glover is also 80, drummer Ian Paice is 70, and keyboardist Don Airey is 78. Gillan revealed last year that he has lost most of his vision. He long ago stopped trying to hit the screams he threw around on In Rock, and on SPLAT! he leans on a lower, dryer delivery that suggests the old fire without shredding for it. His writing has not softened. Ultimate Classic Rock's Gary Graff pulled the line "I'm a sophisticated man with the emphasis on fist" as a fair sample of where Gillan's head is at.

The freshest element is Simon McBride, who replaced Steve Morse after Morse's 28-year run and debuted on =1. He plays lean. His trades with Airey are the engine of the record, sharp back-and-forth runs on "Arrogant Boy," "The Only Horse in Town," "Guilt Trippin'" and "Third Call" that keep the songs moving instead of parking them for a solo. Airey mixes his palette more than usual too, jazzy piano on "The Beating of Wings" and "Guilt Trippin'," synths on "Sacred Land" and "Scriblin' Gib'rish," and the trusty Hammond underneath.

What actually stands out

A few tracks do the heavy lifting. "Arrogant Boy" opens as what Fortnam called "a compelling second cousin to Highway Star," which is exactly the lane you want Purple in. "Third Call" is where Ian Paice reminds everyone why he is Ian Paice, a surging groove he "pounds as hard as he did 50-plus years ago." "Diablo" and "Guilt Trippin'" both got official videos and both earn them. The title track rides a groove that does not let go and closes the case.

Not everything sticks. "Jessica's Bra" is fleet-fingered playing wrapped around a labored pun, the one moment the album's wit trips over itself. It is a small stumble on a record that mostly does not have them.

Is there a concept, or isn't there?

The band has described SPLAT! as loosely built around the end of humanity, an idea credited to Gillan, framed less as apocalypse than as a change of state beyond the physical. On the page that sounds heavier than the album plays. Graff, listening for it, found "no theme here per se," more a gallery of cautionary tales, characters falling from grace, and tongue-in-cheek posturing than a unified concept record. Both things can be true. Gillan writes in vivid cinematic scraps ("Diablo," "The Only Horse in Town," "Sacred Land"), and the through-line is mood and character, not plot.

The take

The story of SPLAT! is a band that figured out its late style and committed to it. The Ezrin era swapped sprawl for economy, and at some point that stopped feeling like a compromise for aging players and started sounding like a genuine second wind. Purple are not chasing 1972. They are making short, hard, well-argued rock songs with a rhythm section that still swings and a guitarist young enough to push it. That is a better outcome than most bands 58 years deep have any right to. Whether it is truly their best in decades is a fan argument that will run for months. That the argument is worth having at all is the news.