MESSA Open Their North American Run With UNCLE ACID AND THE DEADBEATS Tonight — 28 Dates, Four Of Them Headliners

MESSA are back on North American stages tonight. The Italian quartet open a five-week run as direct support to UNCLE ACID AND THE DEADBEATS at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte, North Carolina, and stay out until October 11, when the tour closes at Irving Plaza in New York.

Twenty-eight dates are confirmed. Four of them are MESSA headline shows slotted into the off-nights — Little Rock on September 11, Reno on the 22nd, Vancouver on the 27th and Grand Rapids on October 5 — which is where anyone wanting the full set rather than a support slot should be looking. There is also a festival stop at Levitation in Austin on September 13. We reported the run in July as beginning on September 5; the confirmed itinerary now opens on the 8th.

The tour follows a summer of festival appearances and carries "The Spin", the band's fourth album, released last year through Metal Blade Records.

That record is where MESSA's self-described "scarlet doom" met the 1980s. What has been less discussed is how it was assembled. Written across six weeks of intensive daily sessions in a 500-year-old villa near the band's hometown of Bassano del Grappa in northern Italy, it was then recorded in a way that deliberately inverted their previous method.

"When we recorded 'Close' back in 2021, we wanted to be all in the same room together," the band explained. "This time we decided to do the exact opposite. We recorded the album in three different locations and timings. This record has seen a lot of rearrangement of the same musical material in order to make a coherent work from start to finish. We also aimed at making the songs work with the most minimal structure while trying not to repeat ourselves too much. We applied a simple rule: if you hear the same thing twice it's enough. Three times? It gets boring."

That rule is audible. "The Spin" rises, falls, broods, bites and destroys across a sound that has always pulled from jazz and blues, punk and prog, black metal and dark ambient — following the triptych of "Belfry" (2016), "Feast For Water" (2018) and "Close" (2022).

The album was partly recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by Maurizio "Icio" Baggio, and features a trumpet solo by Michele Tedesco on "The Dress", synth work by Andrea Mantione of NUOVO TESTAMENTO on "Fire On The Roof", and cover art by Nico Vascellari.

MESSA with UNCLE ACID AND THE DEADBEATS:

"The Spin" is out on CD, digital and vinyl, the latter across seven colour variants including a Roadburn-exclusive picture disc and two alternate-cover pressings. Orders at metalblade.com/messa; band-exclusive vinyl at messa.bandcamp.com/album/the-spin.