Brighton quartet School Disco return with their most expansive and ambitious statement yet, unveiling the striking new album SD IV via Krautpop!. Brooding and hypnotic, the seven-track collection captures the band’s signature blend of progressive rock, psychedelic sprawl and motorik-infused krautrock at its most refined and fearless.
Having built a formidable reputation on the back of high-octane live shows across the UK and Europe, the band channel that same visceral energy into the studio. Recorded at Farm Road Studios with engineering from Jake Smallwood alongside vocalist and guitarist Rory Lethbridge, and mastered by Harry Hayes (School Disco, Roebucks), the record was largely tracked live with minimal overdubs. That decision allows its raw intensity and natural musical flow to shine through, preserving the immediacy that has become central to their appeal.
Drawing inspiration from the monolithic weight of Black Sabbath and the rhythmic experimentation of CAN, the album also filters in a fascination with sci-fi and horror aesthetics. The result is a darker, more meditative body of work that still finds moments of surprising tenderness, revealing a more personal dimension than on previous releases.
Drifting through distant, echo-laden vocals, extended psychedelic instrumental passages and bursts of fuzz-heavy guitar and dappled electronics, the album creates a colourful, ever-shifting sphere of sound. It feels as indebted to the atmospheric sprawl of Pink Floyd’s Meddle-era as it does to the modern psych charge of Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and the intricate ambition of King Crimson. Yet despite those touchstones, the restless creativity driving the record is unmistakably their own.
Reflecting on the process, Lethbridge explains that after extensive touring in support of their previous album, it was difficult to decide how to shape the extended jams that had evolved on stage. “We always want to step up the quality of our recording work, and as a live band that played a lot in support of our last album, ‘Denton Rock’, it was hard to figure out what direction to go in with the extended jams we had been playing. We decided to just record quickly what we had with an experienced engineer focusing on the performances but not dwelling on it too hard. We feel like we now have an album that has a solid live performance at its base but with interesting textures, sounds, synths and production built on top of it, which helped us build some of the most expressive and textural work to date.”
The band’s steady ascent has been bolstered by tastemaker support from BBC Radio 6 Music (New Music Fix), Radio X(X-Posure) and a raft of influential outlets, deepening their cult reputation. On stage they have shared bills with Wolf Alice, Froth, Lime Garden, Population II, Bo Ningen, Dr. Feelgood and Frankie and the Witch Fingers, further cementing their growing following.
With SD IV, School Disco don’t simply refine their sound — they stretch it outward, embracing longer forms, deeper textures and a newfound emotional resonance that signals a band hitting their creative stride.