The Joy Hotel - Consume The Joy Hotel

'Consume' is the bold, expansive second album from Glasgow’s The Joy Hotel — a record that pushes their already distinctive sound into stranger and more ambitious territory.

Following the critically acclaimed album Ceremony, The Joy Hotel returns with an album that embraces contradiction: beautiful and unsettling, intimate and enormous, melodic and chaotic. Across Consume, the Glasgow five-piece weave together psychedelic rock, folk, Americana, indie and experimental textures, underpinned by the trademark vocal harmonies of Luke Boyce and Emme Woods and a cinematic sense of scale.

Consume is an album about trying to satiate our appetite for the endless gruel that the internet has to offer. The band strived to capture what it’s like to navigate heartbreak, nostalgia, panic attacks and aspiring to glory while being ground up in the gears of a 21st Century Promised Land; wanting to be more than a pig in a trough, and remain resilient in the face of apathy.

The Joy Hotel’s greatest strength remains their ability to make a large ensemble feel completely organic. Multiple voices intertwine with guitars, keys, bass and drums to create music that can shift effortlessly from fragile, intimate passages to huge, euphoric crescendos. There is a sense that anything could happen within these songs, with moments of tenderness sitting alongside bursts of noise, psychedelic colour and unexpected arrangements.

The album also captures what has made The Joy Hotel such an exciting live proposition. Their music is expansive without sacrificing immediacy, with melodies that reward repeat listening and arrangements that reveal new details with every play.

The band spent three weeks recording at La Frette Studios outside Paris, approaching the process in a different way to that of their debut album; “we cast off our purist tendencies, building each song from the ground up, ignoring how we made our first record. We wanted to find an entirely fresh approach and to immerse ourselves in creating something that felt like hope in a hellscape.”

Since forming in Glasgow, The Joy Hotel have built a reputation as a genuine word-of-mouth success story, progressing from sold-out hometown shows to appearances at major UK festivals including TRNSMT, Latitude, The Great Escape and Liverpool Sound City, as well as performances across Europe. Their debut Ceremony was met with widespread critical acclaim, with five-star reviews from The Skinny and Scottish Daily Express and strong praise from outlets including The Scotsman, Far Out, Clash and NARC. Ceremony also made the 10-album shortlist for the Scottish Album of the Year 2025 Award.

Consume sees that momentum transformed into something bigger and more ambitious: a richly textured, emotionally charged album from a band increasingly difficult to categorise — and increasingly difficult to ignore. The band will support label mates Big Special on their UK tour throughout November and December 2026, before playing headline shows in 2027.