THE DATSUNS announce new album + single, “Moonstruck Man”!

The DATSUNS – one of Aotearoa / New Zealand’s most celebrated rock bands, the first band out of the Southern Hemisphere to make waves on the early 2000s rock explosion (they toured with the White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, Metallica and others) and the only band of the era who have undeniably kept getting better – have announced a forthcoming new album Moonstruck Man, out through Hellsquad Records
on November 13.

The first taste off the album, which was stitched together in Swedish recording joints & haunts, is out today. The single, also titled “Moonstruck Man”, is a gloriously rambling slice of classic 1970s-inspired rock. Wah pedals wail and guitars scorch, perhaps with nods to Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore and Mountain’s Leslie West.  The high tenored vox & busy rhythms hark back to classic Rush. There’s glam weird & whimsy a la Sparks & Marc Bolan. Tis a tune bedazzled & besotted; moonstruck, indeed.

Before the new album’s release and following a run of New Zealand and Australian dates earlier in the year, the DATSUNS are currently on an extensive run of headline club shows and festival appearances in Europe.  Europe – well Sweden to be exact – being the current home of front Datsun Dolf, who for a good while now has simultaneously managed his Datsun duties with those of being The Hellacopters’ bass man (and before that, with playing bass in head Hellacopter Nicke Andersson‘s other high energy band, the hard rock power-popping Imperial State Electric.)

(And yes, that means we’ll see Dolf down under again next year, when The Hellacopters return to Australia for the first time in 2003.)

Time stumbles on. So does the clan DATSUN. Change the inevitable. Despite the ever warping landscape, the DATSUNS find those paths of least resistance up the mountain, and take their lifetime’s accumulated lessons & mastery of rock, up the proverbial giant rock, to dispel their latest riffage & learnings, from the highest point, upon the masses, with joyous savagery.

The workings towards an eighth volume of Datsun sonics have been marinated upon, wrangled thru, laid down & paid out. It will see the light of day in this year 2026. Though the clan have lost another drummer, Scandinavian thumper Adam Lindmark of Dead Lord fills the drum throne. A host of Swedish drumming familiars also litter recordings, to deliver the Stoogeoid evil, the powerpop crunch or the classic proto rawk assault & battery.

Lead string wrangler Christian comes to grips with the literal new hand he’s been dealt, after a literal handicapped year, whereupon next level surgical intervention was required to save a paw ravaged.

Entrenched in the semi-rural NZ paradise, Phil has wracked mind & mitts to conjure up new weaving guitaring rhythms to dispense to his comrades across the seas.
In the lands of ice & snow Dolf has sound boarded hooks & crunch w/his likeminded Scandinavian pals & also shot back many a reshaped idea & burst of rok energy to his Datsun brothers.

The end result, a new & eighth album. The promise delivered of more running, riffing, dancing rock, in the Western calendar year of 2026, both studio wrecked & wrangled.

Thus finally begins the reveal of these doings & dealings from Datsun times tethered & spent cajoling new searing & soaring tunes…

LISTEN:
https://music.drm.co.nz/moonstruck-man

the DATSUNS
New Album
Moonstruck Man
Out November 13, 2026 on Hellsquad Records

The DATSUNS were always more over-the-top than their new millennium rock contemporaries. And less gimmicky. They came from a heavier place; heavy in the early ’70s use of the term, but with a garage-rock rawness and a punk-inspired energy and pace. Heavy music of course has never stayed fashionable for lengthy periods, and the DATSUNS paid the price; after smashing it with their self-titled first album, the fickle tastemakers of the time decided that their second album – produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones no less, and in many ways anticipating Jones’ return to rock alongside Josh Homme and Dave Grohl in Them Crooked Vultures – was on a par with what many critics in the early ’70s thought of Zeppelin. They duly retreated from the limelight as new trends emerged, but they never gave it up. More albums followed, and more tours. Tours of New Zealand. Tours of Japan. Tours of Europe. All managed despite being spread across hemispheres, with front man Dolf de Borst an honorary Swede (and also a member of both the legendary action rock trailblazers The Hellacopters and The Hellacopters’ power pop rock spin-off Imperial State Electric), and guitarist Christian Livingstone living in London and making guitar FX pedals.

Having stuck it out through the lean times, the DATSUNS returned to the fray in 2021 with their first new album in 7-8 years, the much-acclaimed Eye to Eye, as new variations on their preferred themes of heavy music – new forms of garage, psych and metal, and cross-pollinations of the lot – were establishing new audiences.

And now, having toured Australia for the first time since 2014 earlier in the year, the DATSUNS are back with new music once again. And what new mind-blowing new music it is; a singular hard rock sound entrenched in the past but remodeled for the future, one unknown & now more uncertain than ever.