DEVIL ELECTRIC: Return Of The Riff (2026)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

IT’S BEEN five years since vintage rock/doom mongers Devil Electric last released an album. 

Godless dropped in the wake of COVID and foreshadowed a period of personal turmoil and tragedy for the band that held off the release of Tahlia until last month.

“There’s been a lot of personal challenges, I would say, within the band,” says guitarist Christos Athanasias from his lavish-looking ‘mancave’. “It was recorded a while ago, and it was recorded with Tom, our previous bassist. So it becomes this thing of changes in people’s lives. We had COVID and the release of Godless. Then we had Tom leave the band and we had Aiden join the band.” 

Tom Hulse left Devil Electric in early 2023, after the band recorded Tahlia. Former Massive bassist Aiden McGarrigle was chosen as his replacement. On August 29 the same year, McGarrigle died suddenly at the age of 33. Nick Dumont from Athanasias’ other band The Ugly Kings then joined the group and there was “this revival of interest again,” according to the guitarist. But a yet more personal tragedy was soon to follow.

“In 2024,” he says, “my mother got unwell and she ended up passing, so that was a very hard year for me.”

It took until last year for Athanasias and Devil Electric to find the motivation to get their long-dormant album out in front of an audience.

“We used the year 2025 to reinvigorate the band and say, ‘Right, we’ve got this piece of art that we haven’t let out into the world, so we owe it to ourselves and to everyone else to do so, and do it well’. Then we can go on the writing journey. It’s almost like a bit of a catapult: there’s the reinvigoration of the band, despite the fact we’ve had it recorded for a while, it’s still fresh for us and from the feedback we’ve had to the singles, it still seems to be fresh for other people. Obviously they haven’t heard them before, but the sound still translates.”

Tahlia was prefaced by three singles. “This Hereafter”, the second, is a near-10- minute multi-part epic that closes both the record and their live shows.  

“‘This Hereafter’ […] is the longest song we’ve ever written,” Athanasias tells me. “It’s three songs in one, pretty much. It takes you on a pretty wild journey from this fast-paced half into this doom centre into this pretty emotionally-driven outro. Both for an album and for a live set, the song works perfectly to be the last song. Even from the debut album, we’ve had this interest, you could call it, in one of the singles being the last song on the album. It works out really well, because people get to hear it, first of all, because a lot of people don’t get to the end of an album these days.”

As a member of a band styled in the vintage tradition, it’s important for Christos that albums are taken as a complete experience, not just a random collection of tracks.

“I still love listening to albums as opposed to listening to playlists,” he says. “I like going on the journey that the artist plans for my ears, and discovering all of those things along the way. It’s a fantastic thing and being able to do that for other people is also good and I hope people appreciate it. Especially being the last song: it tells a story.”

Those familiar with the work of Christos Athanasias from either of his bands will know that the man is a true rifflord. Studiously devoted to the riff itself with less emphasis on leads or groove, Athanasias seems to draw from an apparently bottomless, Iommi-like well of inspiration. 

“That’s great feedback! How do I answer that?” He smiles broadly. “It’s all part of the creative process and one that’s very hard to explain, how it happens. Sometimes you just feel like there’s something there, and it comes out. It is more of a case of exploration and through that exploration and finding these different riffs. What I really like about Tahlia, for example, and this is exactly what I felt when I wrote that intro riff: this is doom tango! It’s got this dance kind of groove to it, but it’s such a dark-sounding riff that it almost should be a tango – it’s doom tango! It’s the only way to describe it. Then it jumps into this upbeat verse and Pip’s vocals just makes it shine. That song is all about how strong that verse is, and I love it because I love early Sabbath where you didn’t really have a chorus, you just had really strong verses.” 

Devil Electric doesn’t necessarily follow Black Sabbath’s unconventional template, even if some of their songs end up going in different directions from where they began. Others follow very traditional songwriting ideas.

“There’s still plenty of conventional song structures, like ‘Weirdos’. What happens in ‘Weirdos’ is that you’ve got this upbeat, fresh element that – I wouldn’t say makes it a “happier” song, but it’s definitely a happier song than the first single. It has more of a pop twist, you could say. Doom-pop!”

Doom-pop. Doom-tango. There’s definitely a lot going on across Tahlia. It’s hardly a one-dimensional affair.

“There is a lot,” the guitarist agrees, “and we do have a collaboration on the second last track. It’s a collaboration with Seedy Jezus. Lex from Seedy Jezus plays a great solo on that, and there’s some vocal samples in there that are spacey. It’s a trip that song, and it goes on for a while – I think it’s about seven minutes.”

“I’ll tell you something else that I don’t think anyone else has mentioned in an interview about Tahlia,” he continues. “That song was written as an outro to ‘Take the Edge Off’, from Godless. ‘Take the Edge Off’ was probably the shortest song on the album. I think it’s about two and a half minutes. As soon as that song ended, ‘Acid Bath’ was meant to be what goes after it, and we were going to have that. But we thought about it, and that song was so strong as a single, it would do it injustice to make it a nine-minute song that has a two minute single part, then a seven minute psychedelic part! So we decided to split it up and it ended up on two different releases.”

It’s now time for Devil Electric to take these songs directly to the people. Their first round of shows will be in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide this month.

“We now get to revitalise the live aspect of the band and what is great to see is that it doesn’t actually feel like it’s been that long. That’s a good thing, because five years can be a long time in people’s lives. It’s half a decade. In that same timeframe, bands decide to just disband and not be around each other anymore and not play music. But we seem to have found that level of reintegration both in the live setting and jamming together and writing music together again, and in playing live and releasing music. It’s exciting times, because we keep on writing. We are planning to record more music this year. It’s exactly what I said before, it’s a catapult moment of saying let’s use this release as the reinvigoration and then move quick to the next step of recording some more.”

APRIL 18: Chuck Trailer’s, Sydney City
APRIL 25: Ed Castle, Adelaide
MAY 23: Northcote Social Club, Melbourne