Gimme Some Blood

Here come The Struts with “Gimme Some Blood,” track ten off Pretty Vicious, the fourth studio album from the Derby four-piece who still treat a rock and roll stage like it owes them rent. Luke Spiller sings it like a man who has already spent the deposit. Adam Slack’s guitar answers him in short, nasty phrases. Jed Elliott locks the bass to Gethin Davies’s drums, and the whole thing moves like a club band that somehow got booked into a bigger room and refused to change the set. Pretty Vicious arrived on November 3, 2023, through Big Machine, the band’s first full-length for that label, recorded at East Iris Studios in Nashville and cut to about forty-four minutes. Spiller called it the record that shows off each player’s strengths, and “Gimme Some Blood” is the proof in the middle of side two.

The song runs a shade over four minutes. Spiller and Slack wrote it. Natt Webb produced this cut, while Julian Raymond and the band handled most of the rest of the album, with Scott Borchetta as executive producer. Chris Lord-Alge mixed it. Ted Jensen mastered it at Sterling Sound. That split in the production credit matters. The rest of Pretty Vicious leans on Raymond’s polish. “Gimme Some Blood” keeps a rougher edge, closer to the room the band actually plays. On the vinyl it sits as the fourth cut on side B, right after “Better Love” and just before the closer, “Somebody Someday,” an Ian Hunter song that tips the hat to Mott the Hoople. Between a love song and a glam elder’s tune, this one is the street fight.

The lyric is pure Spiller swagger with the brakes off. He opens on a wicked tongue like a storm in rage and a heart that always claimed balls bigger than his brains. Ambition never told him his shoes were bigger than his feet. Then the pre-chorus drops the postcard stuff: angel wings, romantic swings, coffee cups and OK magazines. He needs more than that. The chorus is the demand. Doctor, gimme some blood. I’m all out of love. Sister, give me some medicine. I’ve been a gentleman. It is not a medical chart. It is a rock and roll transfusion, the same idea that used to show up when bands wanted volume, nerve, and another night on the boards. Verse two puts the business up on Primrose Hill, the London rise with the view of the city, where money is the weapon and the bullets are dressing to kill. Profits get cut on the tabletop. The gentleman line is the joke. Nobody in this song is behaving.

The Struts formed in Derby around 2009 and 2010, when Spiller and Slack started writing together. Early bass and drums rotated. By 2012 the lineup settled: Spiller on vocals, Slack on guitar, Elliott on bass, Davies on drums. Spiller grew up in a strict Christian house in Bristol with almost no secular records in the room, then found Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and the door blew open. Queen, Slade, the Faces, T. Rex, and the big American arena bands filled in the rest. The band name is the attitude. They dress like the job still requires a tailor. Spiller in particular treats a microphone stand the way Freddie Mercury treated a crowd, which is why the comparison sticks even when the songs are their own.

The breakthrough was “Could Have Been Me,” the platinum anthem off the debut Everybody Wants. The UK version of that album landed in 2014. The American edition followed in 2016 on Interscope, after the band had already opened rooms they had no business filling yet. Dave Grohl later called them the best opening band Foo Fighters had ever had. That line did more for them in the States than a stack of magazine covers. Young & Dangerous arrived in 2018. Strange Days came in 2020, with “Low Key in Love” alongside Paris Jackson. Pretty Vicious is the fourth, and the first time they tried to bottle the live show instead of sanding it down for radio. John Varvatos has been in the orbit for years, which fits. These are clothes-and-volume people. The album cover also marked the first studio record with the updated logo.

Singles off Pretty Vicious ran ahead of the album: “Too Good at Raising Hell” in June 2023, “Rockstar” in September, the title track in October. “Gimme Some Blood” was not pushed as a single, which is why it still feels like a deep cut you find after the hits have done their job. Around the release they turned up on Howard Stern and Good Morning America, then headed out on the Remember the Name dates in Britain and Europe and a North American headline run. The track listing is eleven songs: “Too Good at Raising Hell,” “Pretty Vicious,” “I Won’t Run,” “Hands On Me,” “Do What You Want,” “Rockstar,” “Remember the Name,” “Bad Decisions,” “Better Love,” “Gimme Some Blood,” and “Somebody Someday.” Horns arranged by Tim Lauer show up in the credits on this cut. The rhythm section stays in front of them.

What you hear in the chorus is the same contract The Struts have kept since the Derby rooms. They are not a nostalgia act quoting 1973. They are a working band that decided the old tools still work if you swing them hard enough. Slack’s guitar does not wander. Elliott and Davies play like a single instrument. Spiller sells the doctor-and-sister bit without winking so hard that the song collapses into comedy. The Primrose Hill line is the British tell. Plenty of bands write about the city. Fewer put the hustle on a specific hill and then ask for blood because the love account is empty. That is glam with a ledger.

If you want the records, the dates, and the new music they have been cutting since Pretty Vicious, the band keeps the door open at thestruts.com. The official pages are Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans run their own room too: the Strutters group on Facebook and the fan account on X. And you are hearing it on The Zoo, the station that still plays the album cut when the single has already left the building. The Struts, “Gimme Some Blood,” from Pretty Vicious. Doctor’s orders.