James Marriott

Step inside the visceral, immersive world of Warning Signs, the third full-length effort from ascendant singer-songwriter James Marriott, where “pop magic” is all about the moment – the split second in a song when everything snaps into focus. You can hear this particular musical frisson in ‘Double Bed’, where a single synth line surges into life. It’s there in lead single ‘Burn Down The Disco’, which cuts to black on the words “momentary heart attack”, dropping out to let the lyric land before slamming back in. By the time you reach ‘Déjà Vu’, the guitars are practically being thrown at you, cresting in a bridge of epic, blown-out riffs.

“This album, it’s all ‘moment-based’ for me,” Marriott, who is based in Brighton, explains. “For a song to latch into my head, there has to be a moment where I think, ‘Oh yeah, this is amazing.’ I can pick out something in every track on the record that gives me that feeling”.

In a satisfying mirroring of form and content, almost every single song on Warning Signs (due January 8, 2027 via AWAL) grapples with subject matter as emotionally enormous as the sound of the album itself: coming to terms with the end of a relationship, when one’s reality has been irrevocably ruptured and the rhythms of the day-to-day start to unravel.

At its core, the 11-track collection is “a triangle” that the 29-year-old says represents “the rise and the fall of a man in love”. The record starts in a suspended state of anticipation, before its author walks into a disco and flirts with the rush of desire, climbs to a dizzying, almost numbing apex of yearning, then slides, headlong, through the aftermath of a breakup. Each song is tagged with its own literal ‘warning sign’: a double bed for early intimacy; a mirrorball for the night aflame; looping arrows to represent late-night spirals.

The album concept was born from the hazard-style weather symbols used in the music video for 2025 standalone single ‘California Rain’, which detailed the strange blur of life on the road. Playing with those storm and flood icons “woke something up” in Marriott: what if they could instead represent the contrasting emotional states in his music? It’s a question he turned over while touring the world in the wake of last year’s chart-topping LP Don’t Tell The Dog and its 2023 predecessor Are We There Yet?, with Marriott receiving support from Radio 1 and landing the covers of Dork, House Of Solo and Rock Sound, the latter of which awarded him their Breakthrough Artist Award towards the end of 2025.

The latter album’s commercial success elevated him to major festivals including Reading & Leeds, Latitude, Neighbourhood Weekender and Electric Picnic, headline tours across the UK, Europe and North America (with a rescheduled Australia run booked for this October), while Marriott capped off an incredible year with two sold-out shows at London’s Roundhouse.

Throughout it all, Marriott has garnered an impassioned fanbase who revere him for his refusal to play by type, and for the way he keeps pushing his obliquely funny, candid songwriting forward. A former YouTuber who built an audience through chaotic pop culture commentary and challenge videos, he defies that past without disowning it, sidesteps the obvious, and now, with Warning Signs, has delivered his most engrossing album yet.

“It’s funny, because there really are two different pools of people who know me now: some from the online world, and others who have found me through my music,” Marriott says. “I’m completely at peace with that. I’d never shun the thing that got me here, which is an audience willing to give everything a go. As an artist, that’s all you can hope for: people who’ll buy a record, come to a show, and follow you wherever you want to take it”.

Marriott sees the forthcoming album as “putting a full stop on everything that’s come before”. Emboldened by risk-tasking, rigour and radicalism of contemporary acts such as Magdalena Bay, Slayyyter, Charli xcx and Underscores, plus Harry Styles’ sonic and aesthetic shifts on the club-leaning Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, he believes “music is currently more honest than it ever has been” and in turn, Warning Signs finds him meeting that moment – an album that metabolises spitting fury, self-doubt and heartbreak into something euphoric.

Recorded across a month-long period at Daft Studios in the Belgian Ardennes, the secluded location allowed Marriott and his collaborators, also joined by members of his live band, to “just really knuckle down and get lost in the music”. 12 hour-long studio days would start in the control room and roll on until the evening, before the group would reconvene to watch films together. Alongside the aforementioned influences, Marriott was pulling from the steel and sugar of Dua Lipa and the big-sky emotion of Sam Fender to hone his vision of “anti-pop”, which he describes as “an introverted version of pop music”: writing within the framework of anthemic songs as from the point of view of an “outsider”, who loves “every genre going” and simply follows wherever his curiosity for new music takes him.

Marriott left these sessions re-energised about his direction as an artist, as though his future suddenly felt expansive and alive with possibility. “It was the absolute best environment to create music in,” he says. “Every time I was in the studio with brilliant people, I felt supported and I learned so much. I think the existence of the album is testament to that”.

Such was the impact of working on Warning Signs that, once the final mixes were sent off, Marriott sat alone in his home studio and cried his way through the record, six times over. “It’s like The Truman Show,” he says. “You spend years in this internalised world, and then one day you walk through the door that feels endless and open – like you’re finally leaving that world behind.” Warning Signs, therefore, starts to show just how far he can go as a musician, detonating the glossier feel of his earlier work to indulge in a jagged, Geese-inspired chorus on ‘Hell’ or a towering final release on ‘Five Year Plan.’

Away from music, Marriott has built what he calls a deliberately calm and “therapised” existence for his day-to-day routine: mornings of coffee and reading nihilist literature, long solo walks, hours of focused writing, occasional evenings spent on the beach. “If you have orderliness in your life, then you can truly go out and be disorderly in your art,” he says, adding that in the future, he is keen to explore writing for theatre or film scores, inspired by the “weird, punky route” that Trent Reznor has taken with his Nine Inch Noize project.

“Exploring art in a multitude of mediums further aids my writing processes. I think there’s been very clear growth in what I’m doing since I started journaling, too, which will feed into my next pieces of music,” Marriott explains. “But ultimately, my true love is music. It always has been. I have big plans for the future but what’s important is that I stay excited.”

Following a One Night Only show at Brixton Academy in September, Marriott plans to hurl these songs into many more bigger rooms than he ever dreamed of. As you might expect of someone who grew up on YouTube, and as has been evident throughout his musical career, Marriott has an instinctive understanding of visual storytelling, and his drive to make his live shows “deliberately theatrical” chimes with the scorched-earth endings and romantic fallout of Warning Signs. What ties these maximalist ambitions together is a newfound confidence; a sense of contentment and belief in exactly who he is. The goal of any truly great artist.