Walt Disco

In the organizer's words:

With their debut album Unlearning, which was nominated for the Scottish Album of the Year Award and Best Independent Album at the AIM Awards, and their high-profile appearances as support acts for bands such as Simple Minds, Duran Duran and Primal Scream as well as performances at Glastonbury, Latitude and SXSW in the USA, Walt Disco have gained a worldwide fan base. Hollywood superstar and cult queer icon Tilda Swinton called them her new favorite band. Walt Disco have been touring non-stop with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) for months. Another North American tour with the English electronic pop icons will follow in the fall. In November, Walt Disco will then come to Germany for four headlining shows to present their new album The Warping live.

The Warping will be released on June 14 by Lucky Nummer. You can listen to "You Make Me Feel So Dumb" - the album's "cynical disco banger", inspired by the social burnout the band suffered from networking on tour - and the first single "Pearl" in advance. Written on both sides of the Atlantic, from Los Angeles and Austin to Glasgow and London, The Warping is a significant step forward for the band, who have already enjoyed great success with their debut album Unlearning. On The Warping, deeply personal themes are taken up and brought to the fore with skillful lyricism, conveying feelings of envy, fear, joy and hope from individual experiences. The longing 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 band have taken the cinematic glam of their debut even further, enlisting classically trained orchestral musicians. The horns, woodwinds and swelling strings add a whole new layer to the Walt disco sound - one that feels both fantastically organic and technically accomplished. While the groundwork was laid during the recording sessions at Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera's studio, the songs themselves were largely a collaborative effort. The Warping was co-produced by the band and Chris McCrory, the engineering is by Chris D'Adda of The Vale Studios, and the instrumentation is almost entirely analog.

About the new album, the band explains: "With The Warping we explore themes of change, growth and dealing with the complex struggles that occur in everyone's life. It feels like our most biographical work to date. Listening to it now, it's like a snapshot for us as people and as a band. This album is a roadmap of our vulnerability in a way, but it feels good to be so honest with our music and lay it all out on the table, both with our lyrics and our arrangements. That acceptance of our own emotions and honesty with ourselves is what we hope people can take away from listening to The Warping."