Deep Purple show no sign of easing off the gas. With their new record Splat! still days away from release, drummer Ian Paice says the hard rock legends are already kicking around the idea of heading back into the studio for another album as soon as 2027.
Speaking on the “Rockonteurs” podcast, Paice discussed Splat!, which arrives July 3 via earMUSIC and marks the band’s sixth team-up with producer Bob Ezrin, who has overseen every Deep Purple album since 2013’s Now What?!.
When co-host Gary Kemp read out a quote in which Ezrin said he hoped to keep working with the band for “a very long time,” Paice revealed that talks about the next record are already underway.
“Well, that’s already being discussed for… This [2026] is a heavy touring year — it’s almost 100 shows or something — so next year [2027] won’t be the same. You can’t keep doing it that way. So if you have any ideas, making a record’s easy. If you don’t have ideas, making a record’s impossible. So getting together, and if we find we have some ideas we all like, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t put together another record sometime next year. It’s the nature of things. It’s all about ideas. You can be an actor, but if the guy hasn’t written a screenplay, you’ve got nothing to say,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Paice also pulled back the curtain on how the band approaches songwriting these days, describing a loose, collective process where ideas either catch fire or quietly die on the spot.
“Everybody comes in with a couple of basic notions of something that they probably woke up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Oh, that sounds good.’ And one person will start something,” he continued. “Now, if it’s interesting, the other guys will join in. If it’s not interesting, there’s a deathly silence and somebody else starts something. The amazing thing with the whole process is you go in in the morning and you’ve got nothing, and you come out after five, six hours’ work and you got two or three really nice somethings. And that’s what keeps it working for the next day. ‘Okay, that was a really good day.’ But you don’t get three good ideas every day. The first day, all these things you’ve had loitering in your mind, they come to the fore. So next day, there aren’t that many ideas, so it becomes a little more difficult as you go through. But after 10 days, you’ve probably got a lot more than you can put on an album in the way of ideas, but you gotta then separate the wheat from the chaff.”
The drummer explained that the band captures every second of these sessions, knowing a great moment can vanish as quickly as it appears.
“Oh, yeah, you capture everything. ‘Cause you may only play something once as a jam, and it’s gone. So if you’ve caught it and say, ‘Well, there was something good five minutes ago,’ and then you take that and you see if you can go further with it. And so it’s that process of trial and error. When you start something, everything you do is the best thing that’s ever been written, ’cause you’re all excited about it. The next day you go, ‘What a piece of crap.’ But it’s always been that way. We never had one dedicated songwriter. So it becomes out of the influence of the five people. Initially the four, because Ian‘s [Gillan] there noting all the atmosphere and what the emotions of it are,” he concluded.
Splat! has been billed in press materials as “the heaviest Deep Purple album in many years.” So far the band has shared two singles from the record, “Diablo” and “Arrogant Boy“. The former features a notable guest, Grammy-winning superstar Keith Urban, who adds second guitar to the track.
Deep Purple have recently launched a major run of European summer shows, opening in Finland before heading to Norway, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Italy, with the Splat! world tour set to roll on into North America. The touring schedule spans 86 shows across 28 countries — the kind of relentless pace that has defined the band for more than five decades.
The full track listing for Splat! is as follows:
Side A
- “Arrogant Boy“
- “Diablo“
- “The Rider“
- “The Lunatic“
Side B
- “The Only Horse In Town“
- “Sacred Land“
- “The Beating Of Wings“
Side C
- “Guilt Trippin’“
- “Scriblin’ Gib’rish“
- “Jessica’s Bra“
Side D
- “Third Call“
- “My New Movie“
- “Splat!“
