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Ever heard a concept album whose ‘concept’ you completely grasp? Well, add the third album from these hairy East Midlanders to the ‘Your guess is as good as mine’ list. But disregarding the murder/death/ gruesomeness lyrical theme that broadly unites these songs, what matters more is that The Serial Killer Suite rocks as hard as anything this Stoner-influenced quartet have produced thus far.

Epic Doom’s staccato assault seems to address how we make a circus out of a ‘freak of society’, but that’s about as clear as it gets, lyrically. Meanwhile, taut, muscular riff-hooks abound, alongside melodramatic tritone intervals, pummelling bass drums and growling vocals. And if you can live with some pretty hoary old double entendres (‘Open wide and let me come inside’), you’ll be absorbed long enough to try working out just what they’re saying about serial killers, the universe and everything else.

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.