The Joshua Hotel:

Rapture Party debut album launch

An Seomar, Inverness: September 27, 2025

Joshua Mackenzie in the frame at The Joshua Hotel’s An Seomar gig on Saturday. Picture: MC

By Margaret Chrystall

HERE we are again at a landmark Joshua Hotel gig. It’s the big one, the launch of the *cliche-warning* – long-awaited – debut album. And it’s a different venue as usual.

A Saturday night in Inverness and there’s a crowd seeping into the venue.

When it comes to this special 2025 night, it’s …

Not that first Inverness hometown gig for The Joshua Hotel at Mad Hatters four years ago. Set against a gold lurex fringe stage curtain, the band amongst big round lights facing the unspoken audience question – could they even play it all live?

They could play live. Tick. The songs and band turned technicolour live. Tick.

When it comes to this special 2025 night, it’s …

Not that first and last-ever The Joshua Hotel gig at the Ironworks in its last few weeks of existence in 2023. Invited onto the line-up as guests of headliners Iain McLaughlin And The Outsiders, the Joshua three played evolving songs, new songs. Frontman Josh’s whistling on Don’t You Remember floated over the venue, maybe the strongest song that night with its knowing refrain: “It’s OK to make some mistakes, when you’re golden and you’re young.” It made you mourn those future triumphant gigs that the band would never get to play there.

When it comes to this special 2025 night, it’s …

Not that 2024 sunny white summer festival tent at Belladrum, a crowd filling the space and the band smiling out at the end of their set.

When it comes to this special 2025 night, it’s …

Here. A big deal that has been building since 2021 at least. By that year, lead singer and songwriter Joshua Mackenzie of Inverness band Lional (now on a break) had created a lockdown solo project that quickly took on its own life, a name – The Joshua Hotel and musicians Louis Slorach and Josh Gilbert.

Since then, there has been a stream of singles and EPs to drip-feed a new addiction for Joshua Hotel fans in a series of tantalising songs that took indie electronica and soulful post-punk – and what someone inspiringly and accurately dubbed “psychedelic dreampop” – and created their own quirky, inventive world.

But Saturday’s gig was the first chance to hear the newly-launched album’s songs live, and to celebrate the older songs alongside them too. For me, the set was destined to combine the backstory to where The Joshua Hotel have been, and to spotlight a big showcase of Rapture Party songs and where the band’s latest adventures in music are taking them.

Smart enough to indulge a hometown audience with songs they know and love – one moment being the crowd whistling along to Don’t You Remember – The Joshua Hotel setlist still managed to pack in snapshots of an album that boldly moves everything on.

The gig rolled out many ‘old favourites’ – such as 2007 love mismatch story Repetition Town, the chilling futuristic bustle of Love Is An Algorithm, the looping words of borderline stalker confessional Somebody New, end-of-love plea Let Me Go By, reluctant love-splitters I Don’t Want To Go and euphoric encore substitute Oblivion Days, all making the cut.

Live, the mix of old and new worked with all the drama The Joshua Hotel can bring to their performance.

Rapture Party, the debut album by The Joshua Hotel.

From the start, a group of girls down the front screamed in true Beatles-mania style when the lights first went down as they detected movement on the dark stage.

Then it was turn-about old and new songs – recent single and album track Local Girl Builds A Rocket, live favourite Queer Holiday; the album’s Our Lonely Hearts, then Don’t You Remember.

All the time, Josh’s vocal oozed over us like dark chocolate, just occasional phrases making it out through the blitzkrieg of sound that couldn’t quite destroy the melody coming from Josh, Josh G and Louis, the three rampaging, attacking drums, stabbing keys, brandishing guitars (Josh threw his down at one point) and filling every move with intent.

Is this the way to hook you in? Phrases leaping out from songs you’ve never heard before – “I’ve been waiting my whole life and I’m bored to tears/ Let’s torch your car and watch it burn…” (Easy Feeling). Or later, after the gig, checking out the merch table albums on CD, to find new song phrases never quite what you thought you’d heard. Better, weirder.

Last song – too soon – Oblivion Days takes you back. The lyrics, in a car, Josh confessing “I feel like an actor, I love the pretence.” Band on the brink mainman is a role Josh is well cast for.

The Joshua Hotel, Josh and his band brothers, the curation of image, style, easy humour, videos, songs – songstories about time, small-town claustrophobia, real and angsty relationships, none of it ever far in songs old or new from “forever” – now showcase an album to stretch us and them, worth the wait and ready to be loved. This was a live launch gig worthy of all that.

The band’s album Rapture Party gets a Glasgow in-store launch at Music From Big Blue on Friday, Oct 10 at 7pm, tickets £10.

The album Rapture Party on Last Night From Glasgow – “written in the Highlands and recorded on the West Coast in Largs” – is out now to stream, and on CD and vinyl. Also featuring Shanine Gallagher. Mixed, mastered and co-produced by Jason Shaw. Supported by Creative Scotland.

Support on the night came with 10 songs from Swiss Portrait.