Analysis: The Darkness Tour, Special Edition is for Metal Fans

You can’t blame The Darkness for hedging their bets. Their fourth album, 2015’s Last Of Our Kind, is their heaviest — or, more accurately stated, it’s The Darkness album whose sessions yielded the largest number of legit heavy metal jams. More accurately still: Those sessions yielded an album’s worth of the band’s heaviest, awesomest ever. That’s good news for fans of metal.

But for a band with their expectations for sales, the smart move is to not release a pure heavy metal album. For one thing, do they even have a shot at our interest after having “offended” us with their irreverence of heavy music for years? And second, would any wise businessperson fail to address the fans he cultivated on a big fancy support tour just a few years prior? Probably not and definitely not, respectively. That’s bad news for fans of metal.

However, things have changed: A solution arrived a few months ago in form of a deluxe edition of LOOK, via which we metal people can get what we want — and only a bit later than did non-metal people. The expanded album contains four very heavy, very awesome bonus jams that didn’t make the first version of the album (duh); so we can swap those with the incongruous non-metal tracks — which do not meet Darkness standards of excellence anyway — and bam! everybody wins. LOOK suddenly makes perfect sense.

And this is why it’s especially exciting that frontman Justin Hawkins and gang have announced a spring US tour, during which they can play more from LOOK, not least of all its bonus gems that freaking slay (one below). And while I’m dishing out orders I’ll also request a ripping bonus track from the previous album. Dates and Hawkins wit here. I’ll tweet the tracklist for LOOK special Anso eDFition, it’s awesome.