A FLASH FLOOD OF COLOUR
If you’ve ever listened to literally any rock ’n’ roll song, there’s a good chance that, somewhere along the chain, Deep Purple’s influence rubbed off on it. A key element to the genesis of modern heavy music – so much so that the Guinness Book of World Records branded them “the globe’s loudest band” – the British shredders have been doling out their colourful solos and crunchy riffs since 1968.
Over the last five decades, they’ve managed to smash out a truly cataclysmic 20 studio albums – not to mention to near-uncountable deluge of demos, bootlegs and extra releases to bear their kaleidoscopic stamp of approval. And they’ve hardly settled down; in 2017 they embarked on the Long Goodbye tour, which would supposedly see them fizzle out their touring efforts. But when the stint ended at the tail end of 2019, it only took a few months for Deep Purple to announce yet another sprawling world tour.
Unlike most bands of their caliber, too, Deep Purple aren’t simply kicking on as a legacy act churning through the hits of their “glory days” – they’re still living theirs, after all, and celebrating them with a brand new collection of bold and bombastic hard-rock anthems. Whoosh! marks a striking return to the classic sound of Deep Purple, capitalising on thick, byzantine chords and polychromatic rhythms that stick to the eardrums long after the songs themselves have ended.
As frontman Ian Gillan so elegantly puts it, “Whoosh is an onomatopoeic word that, when viewed through one end of a radio telescope, describes the transient nature of humanity on Earth; and, through
