James Marriott Announces Third Album Warning Signs

James Marriott has confirmed his third studio album, Warning Signs, for release on 15 January 2027 through AWAL. It’s a rawer, more immersive turn for an artist who’s built a reputation on being hard to predict, pushing his sound into new territory again.

The news lands the morning after James played what’s now his biggest ever headline gig, a sold-out night at O2 Academy Brixton, where he used the stage to reveal the album live to a rapturous response. It’s the same trick he pulled at Reading Festival a fortnight earlier, when he used his own set there to tease the Brixton date itself.

The record’s 11 songs trace a fairly familiar arc: the buzz of a new crush, tipping into obsession, then the fallout once the relationship’s actually over. What ties it together, Marriott says, is his fixation on the exact instant a song ‘clicks’ into place, the moment it stops being just an idea and becomes something close to pop magic.

“This album, it’s all ‘moment-based’ for me,” James 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.”

You can hear that moment-to-moment logic across the tracklist. Lead single ‘Burn Down The Disco’, just named a BBC Radio 1 Track of the Week, drops into total silence on the line “momentary heart attack” before slamming back in. ‘Déjà Vu’ works towards a bridge of huge, distorted guitar. ‘Hell’ leans on jagged, Geese-style guitar work, and ‘Five Year Plan’ spends its runtime climbing towards one big final payoff.

The whole idea for the record actually traces back to the video for ‘California Rain’, his 2026 UK Top 40 single about the disorientation of life on tour, which used hazard-style weather icons throughout. Marriott has said those storm and flood symbols ‘woke something up’ in him, and he started using them as shorthand for the different emotional states running through the new songs.

The new album follows a genuinely huge stretch for Marriott. His second record, Don’t Tell The Dog, went to UK Number 1, following on from 2023 debut Are We There Yet?, which reached Number 17. Since then he’s played to steadily bigger crowds worldwide, with festival slots at Reading & Leeds, Latitude, Lollapalooza and Electric Picnic, plus headline dates spanning the UK, mainland Europe, North America and Australia, including a near-sold-out run through Australia in October. Two sold-out nights at London’s Roundhouse capped the run before he went back into the studio to make Warning Signs.

Marriott points to the boundary-pushing spirit of Magdalena Bay, Slayyyter, Charli xcx and Underscores as touchstones, alongside Harry Styles’ more club-leaning turns and the polished pop instincts of Dua Lipa. He’s taken to calling the resulting sound ‘anti-pop’: pop songwriting that’s still built around big hooks, just filtered through an outsider’s, more inward-looking perspective.

None of that experimentation changes what’s always driven Marriott, which is his relationship with the people who follow him. He built his first audience online, through irreverent pop-culture commentary, long before he had any music out, and that instinct for connecting with people is really what turned into his career as an artist. These days his following is a genuine mix: people who found him online first, and people who came to him purely through the songs. “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.”

If Warning Signs is about losing your grip on things emotionally, Marriott himself sounds more sure of his own identity as an artist than ever.

Warning Signs tracklist:

1. Sleepwalker
2. Double Bed
3. Kiss
4. Lovestruck
5. Burn Down The Disco
6. Déjà Vu
7. Madeline
8. Come Back To Me
9. Lights Out
10. Hell
11. Five Year Plan