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Walt Disco are taking new shape. Lead vocalist and songwriter Jocelyn Si, drummer and co-songwriter Jack Martin, synth player Finlay McCarthy, bass player Charlie Lock and guitarist Lewis Carmichael dismantled accepted narratives and restrictive norms on debut album Unlearning. On their new record the band hold a mirror up to many shifting faces, once again welcoming the listener into a theatrical world, at once euphoric and unsettling. The Warping makes permeable the barriers of time and self, passing back and forth between memory and the future, calling out to younger selves and imagined identities. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Written on both sides of the Atlantic, from Los Angeles and Austin to Glasgow and London, The Warping is a significant step forward from a band who have already seen strong success. After its release in 2022, Unlearning picked up nominations for the Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award and AIM Independent Album of the Year, while shows at SXSW, festivals across Europe and support stints with Primal Scream and Duran Duran saw the band reach new fanbases and cross genre divides.
Taking the cinematic glam of their debut and pushing it further, the band brought in classically trained orchestral musicians. Sonically, the horns, woodwind and swelling string sections lend an entirely new level to the Walt Disco sound – one that feels both fantastically organic and technically accomplished. While the foundations were laid during pre-album recording sessions at Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music’s studio the songs themselves largely come together in collaboration. In comparison to the ‘Frankensteined’ recording process for Unlearning, stitched together across a digital divide of necessity during lockdown, The Warping was co-produced by the band and Chris McCrory, with engineering from The Vale studios’ Chris D’Adda, and the instrumentation is almost entirely analogue.
Deft lyricism takes in deeply personal issues and writes them large, transposing feelings of envy, fear, joy and hope out of individual experiences. Yearning for another self is a recurring dream on The Warping, as they explore gender dysphoria and envy with radical honesty, accepting them as two tangled threads in the same experience. The world, the band note, can feel like a hostile environment at the moment – especially for queer people, trans people, or anyone who is different. But they aren’t going to let that stop them. Jocelyn agrees. ‘If I’m beaten down by it, I’m not going to be able to pay it forward and act accordingly,’ they say. On The Warping, every moment changes with just a trick of the light.
