Blood Sucking Maniacs brings together five generations of the Allen family, helmed by Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen, in a record that treats art and kinship as one and the same. Spanning 121 years of shared history, the group includes sons Bukka and Bale, grandsons Kru, Sled and Calder, alongside extended family members and longtime collaborators from the Panhandle Mystery Band and beyond. The album moves freely between tender ballads and wry, self-referential humour, veering from the heartfelt to the knowingly hammy. It opens and closes with the fetal heartbeat of the family’s newest member, folding past, present and future into a single, living thread. Adopted “maniacs” – including Charlie and Will Sexton, Lloyd Maines and Richard Bowden – deepen the sound with sympathetic, road-worn playing. What unites it all isn’t neat harmony but what Terry calls “blood entropy”: a sprawling, contradictory, fiercely protective portrait of a family writing itself into song.