Walt Disco Walt Disco

Tracks: My Body Knows When To Run, Lies, Never New, Warmface, Don't Do This Alone, New Friends, Coup de foudre, Total Surprise Machine, Look Out For Me, My Body's Still Mine, ...Wonderland

Label: EMI North

There is something fitting about calling your third album Walt Disco. After two records spent pushing, pulling and occasionally losing themselves in different directions, the Glasgow band have arrived at a record that feels less like a reinvention than an acceptance of everything they have already been. It is a statement of identity, certainly, but not one delivered with the certainty of a band who have finally solved themselves. Instead, Walt Disco finds its strength in the messiness of becoming.

Since Unlearning announced them as one of the more distinctive forces in the UK’s alternative scene, Walt Disco have built their reputation on contradiction: theatrical but vulnerable, glamorous but abrasive, and flamboyant but deeply personal. The Warping expanded that palette while leaving the band questioning where they were heading. Here, those uncertainties become part of the music. The result is their most assured album yet precisely because it refuses to pretend that certainty is the destination.

My Body Knows When to Run wastes no time making that clear. A barrage of industrial percussion and crashing drums gives the opener a sense of escape, as if the song is physically fighting its way out of somewhere it no longer belongs. There are echoes of the noisy grandeur of Smashing Pumpkins, the swaggering art-rock of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the theatricality of Bowie and Sparks, but Walt Disco never sounds like they are simply rummaging through a record collection. Their influences are ingredients rather than instructions.

Then comes Lies, one of the album’s most immediately addictive moments. "I’ll fake it ’til I break it" becomes both a hook and a mission statement, Jocelyn Si delivering the line with enough force to make it lodge itself somewhere inconveniently permanent in your brain. The track is restless and propulsive, with vocal layers that give its already huge chorus an almost communal quality. It is the sort of song that seems to get better with the second listen because, by then, you already know exactly when you want to sing along.

Never New takes that momentum somewhere stranger. Its references to Nicolas Cage sit alongside a growing sense of dislocation, the song gradually becoming murkier and more fractured. It captures one of the album’s central tensions: the desire to become someone new while being unable to completely escape the person you were. Walt Disco have always understood the theatrical possibilities of identity, but here the drama feels much more intimate.

That intimacy runs through Warmface, which initially appears to wander away from the album’s main emotional thread. The sounds of checkouts, whispers and sharp guitars create an oddly disorientating environment, while beneath it sits a surprisingly tender question: who, exactly, gets to decide what you should become? If Walt Disco is partly about learning to feel comfortable in yourself, it is equally interested in how difficult that can be when everyone around you has their own idea of who you are supposed to be.

New Friends turns reinvention into something more complicated. Its emotional centre feels bruised, haunted by the people and versions of ourselves we leave behind. “Cold sweats when I hear your name” gives the song a lingering sense of aftermath; moving forward does not necessarily mean leaving everything behind cleanly.

Then there is Total Surprise Machine’ perhaps the record’s strangest and most unsettling turn. Its warmth and theatricality conceal something considerably darker, the repeated imagery of being made for somebody else taking on an increasingly disturbing mechanical quality. Walt Disco have always had a knack for making the bizarre feel glamorous, but here that instinct becomes genuinely unnerving. The guitars scrape and surge beneath Si’s voice, creating the sensation of something beautiful beginning to malfunction.

Look Out for Me is where the album strips away much of its theatrical armour. It is an ethereal, aching song about vulnerability, HRT and the frightening experience of placing yourself in the hands of a healthcare system. Lines about waiting lists and losing oneself transform something painfully specific into something universal: the fear of surrendering control over your own future. It is one of the album’s most affecting performances because Walt Disco do not try to dress the subject up. The grandeur remains, but it serves the vulnerability rather than hiding it.

That makes My Body’s Still Mine hit even harder. The drums pound with almost confrontational insistence while the lyrics reclaim ownership of a body that has been subjected to judgement, expectation and prejudice. There is something unmistakably Bowie-esque about the combination of alienation, glamour and defiance, but the sentiment belongs entirely to Si. The song does not ask for permission to exist. It simply insists upon it.

And then, somehow, the album arrives at Wonderland.

Beginning almost as a whisper, the closer gradually expands into something cinematic and enormous. It feels like the final scene of a film in which the protagonist has spent the entire story trying to understand where they belong, only to discover that there is no neat answer waiting for them. “Here comes the start of our lives” sounds celebratory, but Si sings it with restraint, as though the future is exciting precisely because it remains unknown.

That is ultimately what makes Walt Disco such a compelling third album. It is not a record about reaching some final, perfected version of yourself. It is about recognising that identity is unstable, sometimes painful and often exhilarating — and choosing to move forwards anyway.

There are moments when the album's ambition threatens to overwhelm it, and Walt Disco remain a band more interested in excess than restraint. But sanding away those rough edges would miss the point. Their music has always existed somewhere between the glamorous and the grotesque, the ridiculous and the profound. On Walt Disco, those contradictions no longer feel like competing impulses. They feel like the whole point.

Unlearning introduced Walt Disco. The Warping saw them searching for what came next. Walt Disco finds them embracing the uncertainty — and, in doing so, sounding more completely themselves than ever.