Youngstown band Kitchen Knife Conspiracy now shares a record label with some Rock & Roll Hall of Famers.

The metal band — Ian Pethtel, vocals; Jeremy Cibella and Rickie Palmer, guitars; Fred Whitacre, Jr., drums; and Johnny Kihm, bass – that describes its music as “stompcore” signed a deal with the independent distribution label Deko Entertainment, whose roster includes Slash of Guns N’ Roses, the late John Entwistle of The Who, John Lodge of the Moody Blues, Rik Emmett of Triumph and such acts as The Dictators, Dokken, Brian Setzer Orchestra, Slaughter, Warrant and Tiffany.

Whitacre said he reached out to several labels / distributors to see if there was any interest and Deko contacted him.

“They’re kind of a legacy artist label,” Whitacre said. “It’s a bunch of bands who’ve been around for 30-some years or more.”

However, KKC formed in 1998, and Deko’s roster of about 150 acts includes plenty of performers who didn’t start making music until this century.

“They liked that we’re almost 30 years old (as a band) but we’re still interested in writing new music,” he said. “We’re still willing to do new stuff, but we have enough stuff in our back catalog to be releasing some of these albums in new formats they’ve never been in before, so we’re pretty excited about that.”

Whitacre is an avid record collector who discovered Deko because they are re-releasing an Ugly Kid Joe album on vinyl.

“We’ve never done anything on vinyl before, so it’s just a really exciting opportunity,” Whitacre said. “These guys have good distribution. They’re a subsidiary of Warner Bros. The guys who own the label are really business savvy and they’re open to new artists and willing to take risks on underground artists who aren’t super well known.”

The plan right now is to release two albums through Deko in 2026. One will be an anniversary reissue of an older KKC release. Whitacre said he’s pretty sure which one of its five previous albums will get the reissue treatment, but everything hasn’t been finalized yet, so he didn’t want to reveal the title.

As for the new album, they have plenty of ideas from which to pick.

“We’ve been working on some new stuff for a while,” he said.

“I put all these riffs that we’d written over the last couple of years (together), and it was over an hour and 40 minutes of just riffs. Now it’s just wading through it, deciding what we want to use, what kind of direction we want to go.

“The last album had a little more black metal influence. I don’t know if we’re going to go that direction some more or … it just depends on where the organizational process takes us. But we do have a lot of riffs and a lot of songs at different stages of completion now. So I guess we’ll probably just take 10 or 12 songs we really like, and we’ll put another record together in 2026.”

The deal with Deko gives the band the freedom to make the creative choices about where and what to record.

“They’re willing to let us take the freedom for how we want to get there,” Whitacre said. “They’ll offer suggestions, but they’re not going to be saying what can and can’t go on a record or anything like that. They really want the artists to have their freedom still.”

Whitacre doesn’t envision the band doing any extensive touring in support of the records once they are released, but KKC would like to start playing out more within the region.

The band has a show Nov. 1 at Westside Bowl in Youngstown with Self-Inflicted, Brick Caster and Plinko and another on Nov. 8 in Erie, Pa.

“We’ve been staying local for a few years, but we’d like to reach out,” Whitacre said. “We used to play Cleveland all the time. We actually did better for ourselves in Cleveland in the early 2000s than we did even at home, because we were playing with Cryptkicker and Mushroomhead and all those guys. We’d like to reach out and play some of the bigger cities that are within a decent distance of here and just see what happens.”

Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.