Devils Elbow is named after a notoriously perilous hairpin turn on Mount Barker Road in the Adelaide Hills. Before the South Eastern Freeway opened in 2000, the Devil’s Elbow claimed its unfair share of lives on their way to the city. Lead vocalist Jed Kurzel faced no such close calls on the road during the making of The Mess Hall’s third record—but he believed, utterly, that the Kings Cross rental he wrote it in was haunted to the point of genuine threat, frequently certain that “I never turned that light on.” The company he kept with its malevolence coincided with the death of his father, aunt, and dog before he finally moved out—but not before the experience had darkened Devils Elbow with an edgy eeriness that reaches its zenith when Kurzel decides “I’m gonna take off my clothes/And empty my bones into the river” on “Cookie.” The potential source of said malevolence, Kurzel discovered, might’ve been the specter of former occupant Juanita Nielsen—a publishing heiress who was kidnapped and murdered in 1975 while she was campaigning against developers in the area. Her body was never found, though her tale is alluded to in the spooked crooning of “Betty”: “As she, she rides around/On a carousel” (the Carousel Club was where Nielsen was last seen alive). The ghost that bloodied the blues of Devils Elbow possibly demanded more—2009’s For the Birds sounded even more possessed, and would prove to be the band’s last album.