Idrija one-man band Shaun Banks, who already has 2 international tours across 13 different countries under his belt, kicked off the year by serving up a long-awaited album titled “Deal With The Devil”. Released on February 13, the record takes us on a sonic journey through 11 tracks of Banks’ trademark heavy riffs and punchy rhythms, topped off with raw, powerful vocals (Deal With The Devil, Hey Hey Hey, Smokin’, Take Me Out and Dirty Little Secrets), where the influence of The White Stripes is loud and clear. But he also fills the album with a few different, maybe “softer” tracks like Sunday Blues, For Too Long, Downtown Ho, Baby Let Me Blow Your Harp and Lonely Again On The Road. He produced and recorded the album himself in his home Studio Reverb in Idrija and put it out independently.
“Most of the songs have nothing to do with the album title. I simply went with “Deal With The Devil” because there’s a track on the album with the same name and because it sounds cool. It probably also helped that I’ve made a few “deals” myself that cost me dearly one way or another, and I wrote some of the songs out of those lessons. Even though the album is made up mostly of older songs that are pretty different from each other, I think I still managed to pack it all into a cohesive whole in the end. I surprised even myself in a good way, and I consider myself a perfectionist. The credit for that goes mainly to my musician friends, who encouraged me and steered me along the way while I was creating it.”
Banks, who is currently out on an extensive promo tour across Central Europe and England, also plans to release videos for individual tracks once he’s back. You can already stream “Deal With The Devil” on all the major music platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, Tidal, Youtube and plenty more.
