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Walt Disco Interview: The Truest Picture

Photo by Izzy Leach

BY JORDAN MAINZER

They're growing as a band--sure--but they're also simply able to reveal more of themselves. Glasgow post-punk quintet Walt Disco broke out in 2022 with their debut album Unlearning, a stellar, concise collection of indie rock songs that was stitched together over the Internet during pandemic-era lockdowns. Listening to sophomore album The Warping, out Friday via Lucky Number, at first, you wonder what Unlearning might have sounded like had the band members been able to collaborate in the same room. Then again, Walt Disco has proved to impress due to their clear ability to create something big with constraints, and now, deliver something cohesive with a plethora of options at their fingertips. For The Warping, the band had pre-album recording sessions with Lucas Polo (at the studio of none other than Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music), co-produced the album with Chris McCrory, got Vale Studio's Chris D'Adda to engineer, and collaborated with string and horn players to flesh out already existing arrangements. The result is, well, whatever the opposite of a sophomore slump is, a hard-to-avoid pitfall when your debut already a clear artistic voice. Instead, Walt Disco have provided the glam rock record of the year.

Of course, Walt Disco didn't choose such an aesthetic just because it sounded cool: They needed something to match the grandiosity and gamut of emotions The Warping's songs exude. Lead vocalist Jocelyn Si sings about getting older and gaining self-confidence, often in the context of gender dysphoria they've felt throughout their life. Fittingly, the title track represents the greatest encapsulation of the album's themes and aesthetic, Si delivering bits of stark truth atop high-pitched synth whirrs, textured piano and acoustic guitar, cinematic strings, and staccato percussion reminiscent of Roxy Music and The Psychedelic Furs. Namesake single "Jocelyn" imagines a conversation between singer and mother, a gently galloping song with electric picking, thudding drums, fluttering woodwinds, and slide guitar, Si looking at themselves from what feels like an outside perspective on lines like, "Her name was Jocelyn / She had a worried grin / A mole upon her chin," but ultimately inhabiting their true self. Their ruminations on identity carve other paths, too. Nursery rhyme-inspired "Black Chocolate" tackles the warm parts of family, connecting over food, simplicity that nonetheless wields seemingly infinite emotional power, represented by the song's fast strings, atonal horns, electric synth lines, and huge programmed drum beat.

Much of The Warping is about change, both tangible and in the past, and inevitable and in the future, and not just from Si's perspective. "Weeping Willow" was inspired by the amicable departure of a founding member of the band; its swayed acoustic guitar strum and synth melody answers the question, "If a weeping willow made music, what would it sound like?" "I Will Travel" is a tearjerker for anybody that's lost a pet when Si sings about their family dog, "I will be there at the end of your days and remind you that our deaths are the same." Closer "Before The Walls" is a spiritual sibling to "Jocelyn", Si detailing the imagined last shared words between themselves and their parents. Their vocal vibrato is like its own instrument, chopped and shaky alongside flutes, thumping and thwacking echoed percussion, and woozy strings, the volatility of time incarnate. And "Pearl", penned by drummer Jack Martin and released first as a standalone single before The Warping was even announced, is perhaps most effective in context of the record. Here, Martin imagines himself living alone in Glasgow, "holding onto no one for the long rides," an old-school song rife with lush strings and pop chops, Lewis Carmichael's unexpected slide guitar adding a feeling of seriously expansive solitude. Whether or not these moments of loss have happened or will happen doesn't matter so much as Walt Disco's confronting of all possibilities head-on, again able to survive and thrive amidst the curtailments of life.

The band answered some questions over email about The Warping, including how some of the songs started, the cover art, and playing them live, as well as about their general influences and what art they've been digging lately. Read their responses below, edited for length and clarity.

Photo by Izzy Leach

SILY: Your debut album was put together electronically out of necessity due to being recorded over lockdowns. In contrast, The Warping has all analog instrumentation and features a wide array of live orchestration. Do you think The Warping is a more exemplary presentation of Walt Disco as a band?

Walt Disco: The Warping feels like more of a summation of everyone in the band. We couldn't all be together for most of the making of Unlearning, but here, everyone got to dig their hooks in and throw in a good piece of themselves. It feels like the truest picture of Walt Disco that's come out yet. All of us individually have a varied music taste, loads of different things make us all tick, and this album is a real coming together of all of our tastes and habits.

SILY: Did the lyrics or the music come first on this album?

WD: On a song to song basis, it varies, but mostly it feels as though we were starting from a musical jumping off point and creating the narrative from there. "Pearl" came from its piano part, "The Captain" came from the guitar riff, "Jocelyn" from the bass part. We even had the vocal melody for "Gnomes" figured out before the lyrics were put together. Songs come around in a multitude of different ways. Lyrics are very important to us, and these songs cover a range of subjects we wanted very much to address. We feel the music and lyrics go hand in hand quite deeply on this album.

SILY: Did you collaborate with the players themselves in coming up with the string and horn instrumentation?

WD: We had many of the orchestral elements arranged from the demoing phase. The rest were put together in collaboration with Krayg Miqman, who added arrangements, wrote out the scores, and primarily instructed the players while we were in the studio. The players were given freedom in the studio to interpret a lot of parts for themselves and try things out. They all did a magnificent job and added a lot to these songs with their performances.

SILY: Was there something about the singles released so far that you think made them representative of the album as a whole?

WD: With these singles, we wanted to achieve the same thing we want the album as a whole to achieve, and that's to slightly alter people's perception of the band. We'd never released a song that was anything like "Pearl" before, or "Jocelyn". We weren't exactly known for these kinds of meditative and patient arrangements. Yet, this is something we love in a lot of music, and [we] wanted to present it as something that we're capable of in addition to being maximalist. That's the spirit of the sound of this album, showing people more of what we're capable of.

The Warping album art by Lulu Lin

SILY: What's the story behind the album's cover art?

WD: We discovered the artwork of Lulu Lin while we were in pre-production for recording the album. Our co-producer, Chris McCrory, had one of her pieces saved to his desktop, and it caught our eye. We then looked at the rest of her work online and fell totally in love with her style. The figures she creates seemed to gel perfectly with the narrative and vibe of the album. At that time, she hadn't worked with many bands before, but she took our brief and did something magical. We're very grateful to have come across her.

SILY: Have you performed these songs live? How do you adapt to the live stage an album with such a huge aesthetic and so many players?

WD: With keyboards and synths, there's many ways to recreate organic sounds. We also have a Mel 9 pedal which allows our guitarist to play string and flute samples. There's some backing track to fill in the gaps, but we don't rely on it for most songs. It's always a fun challenge to reinterpret recordings for live shows, it was a lot easier to do with this album than our last.

SILY: Jocelyn, who are some of your favorite vocalists? Are there any that particularly influenced you when developing your singing voice?

JS: Paul Buchanan, Scott Walker, Kate Bush, Linda Ronstadt, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland are vocalists that I love and think are very talented. I think what I'm attracted to most with vocalists is drama, emotion, creativity, and individuality. All my favorite vocalists, those I've named, and others I'm often compared to like Bowie and Billy Mackenzie, all use their voice in a range of ways and use their voices to push the emotion of a song to its furthest point. This is what I try and do, too.

SILY: Jocelyn narrated a short film about queer identity, Christopher at Sea, and the band participated in a Louboutin campaign that challenged the gender binary in clothes. How important is it for the band to explore similar themes to those present in your music, in artistic mediums other than music?

WD: Music has always gone hand in hand with most other forms of media. We see the visuals we make as a way to enhance our world and to create more art in its own right, not just to serve the songs. We want to give that element the care it deserves in the same way we do with our music.

SILY: What are your favorite cities to play in?

WD: London is always a great show. Amsterdam is a favorite, too--lovely people and very polite crowds. We recently had an unreal show in Paris. We've had some great times in Austin, Texas in the past. We're excited to be revisiting all these places on tour this year!

SILY: Is there anything you've been watching, reading, or listening to lately that's caught your attention?

WD: The new Fallout series is incredible. Jocelyn watched Billy Elliott for the first time. It was really good. Jack has been enjoying the drumless edition of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories; the way they build layers of groove even without drums present is unbelievably impressive.

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