Blood Sucking Maniacs Announce Self-Titled Debut Out April 24

The multigenerational family band led by Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen, Blood Sucking Maniacs, will release their self-titled debut album on April 24th, 2026 via Paradise of Bachelors. Alongside the announcement, the band has shared the album’s title track and theme song, “Blood Sucking Maniacs,” available now as a single.

A Release Show (tickets here) is set for May 21st at The Paramount Theatre in Austin, TX. The Allens will also appear at Big Ears Festival (tickets here) in Knoxville, TN for two special performances: the Truckload of Art Road Show, an intimate book reading, signing, concert, and discussion/Q&A, on March 26th, and a full Panhandle Mystery Band set on March 27th.

Blood Sucking Maniacs marks Terry Allen’s first release of all-new recordings since 2020’s Just Like Moby Dick. The project is as expansive as the family behind it: five generations spanning 121 years. Helmed by Terry and Jo Harvey, the band includes their sons Bukka Allen and Bale Allen; grandsons Kru Allen, Sled Allen, and Calder Allen; and great-grandchild Lucky Marlo Allen, whose fetal heartbeat opens and closes the album with the actual (ultra)sound of coursing Allen blood.

Longtime collaborators join the fold as well. Lloyd Maines and Richard Bowden, dubbed the “Blood Brothers”, have been bedrock members of the Panhandle Mystery Band since recording Lubbock (on everything) in 1978. Real-life brothers Charlie Sexton and Will Sexton, affectionately titled the “Bastard Children,” round out the extended clan, alongside additional contributors Barbara FG and John Michael Schoepf.

As a child in the mid-1970s, Bale Allen once constructed an elaborate “vampire trap” in the family’s Fresno front yard, a curious assemblage of crucifixes and mirrors suspended in deadfall. Half a century later, the album Blood Sucking Maniacs resembles that device in spirit: unwieldy and convoluted, ardent and hammy, slightly deranged. A bricolage of potent symbols and spare parts, wary of the eternal, at once affectionate and defensive, vulnerable and dangerous, fiercely protective of past and future wounds. In other words, a family writing (and interpreting) itself.

The songs on Blood Sucking Maniacs are miscellaneous and multiplex, comprising heartrending ballads and arch in-jokes on a spectrum from sublime to unabashedly sentimental, mordant to doting. The unifying principle here is not so much blood harmony as blood entropy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW2SlHHaCPw

Terry and Jo Harvey each contribute five compositions, including their joint rendering of the blues standard “It Hurts Me Too,” here retitled “When Things Go Wrong” (because “the struggle of love,” of relationships, “is the important part,” as Terry told me). Jo Harvey also co-wrote “Let It All In” with the late Susanna Clark, culminating in the wry wisdom: “Don’t shut out no snakes / They might wind up friends / It’s all worth the wonder / Worth going insane again.”

Family lore and legacy course throughout the album. Pauline Allen, Terry’s mother, appears posthumously through cassette recordings captured in Amarillo in the 1970s, including her beloved “St. Louis Blues.” “Red Leg Boy” invokes Terry’s father Sled, while his great-grandson and namesake introduces the track echoing a moment from Terry’s 1999 album Salivation, now a couple of octaves lower. Four generations call out to their forebear from a fifth.

Much of the writing and recording took place at Terry and Jo Harvey’s Santa Fe home and at local studio the Kitchen Sink.

“You could hear music coming from all over the house ... Calder was learning piano from Kru, Kru was learning accordion from Bukka—everyone was learning new licks and just having so much fun,” Jo Harvey recalls. Not without humor, Terry adds: “Getting everybody together was like herding cockroaches.”

Food, drink, and fellowship animate the record’s atmosphere: Topo Chico, tequila, Malbec, black coffee, pork pozole, and green chile chicken enchiladas, alongside Texan voices raised in laughter and song. Calder’s emergence as a young Austin songwriter is evident across his three contributions, while Bukka’s deliberate craftsmanship and Jo Harvey’s beloved poem “Shuck Some Corn” underscore the record’s interplay of reverence and irreverence.

“It’s all one thing,” Terry has often said of his multidisciplinary practice. On Blood Sucking Maniacs, that philosophy extends to family. Art and kinship are not parallel pursuits but a single, conjoined force, flowing together in confluence.

Blood Sucking Maniacs is out April 24th, 2026 on Paradise of Bachelors.

Pre-Order/Save Blood Sucking Maniacs, out April 24th, 2026 on Paradise of Bachelors HERE