Declan Welsh and the Decadent West

East Kilbride first, Glasgow after

Declan Welsh is a songwriter and poet who grew up in East Kilbride, the new town south-east of Glasgow, and the economic history of that town has become the raw material of the band's current record. Welsh has said the lead single from the new album came directly out of watching the place lose its industrial spine, including the Rolls-Royce factory that once employed a large part of it.

The band around him began as a school-age partnership with bassist Ben Corlett, who comes from the same town and played on the first song Welsh wrote. What started as solo acoustic material became a four-piece — Welsh on vocals and guitar, Duncan McBride on guitar, Corlett on bass and Jamie Holmes on drums — trading under the name The Decadent West.

The live reputation arrived before the records did. Reviewing a King Tut's headline on 14 July 2017 for The Skinny, Claire Francis gave the band four stars and described tightly wound punk rock delivered with a clear political address: Welsh introduced one song by telling the room it had been written as a threat to neo-Nazis and inviting any present to identify themselves. Nazi Boys, No Pasaran and Times were in the set, and for the second half of the night Welsh filled the stage with players from The Van T's, The Vegan Leather and The Cut. The habit of turning a gig into a collective event has stuck.

Two albums, an EP nomination and a change of personnel behind the desk

The debut, Cheaply Bought, Expensively Sold, came out on 18 October 2019 via Modern Sky UK, recorded with producer Chris Marshall. Writing for The Wee Review the day before release, Alistair Maxwell called it an excellent debut while noting that it moved between indie-disco, slower ballads and straight guitar rock to the point where it read more as a collection of singles than a single statement, with early Arctic Monkeys the obvious comparison. No Fun, How Does Your Love, Be Mine, Do What You Want, The Dream and Times were the songs he picked out, and several of them are still load-bearing in the live set seven years later.

The 2021 EP It's Been A Year earned the band a Scottish Album of the Year nomination, which remains their most substantial piece of institutional recognition. Earlier EPs — All My Dreams Are Dull, We Wish You All The Best — and the later Impermanency fill in the gaps between the albums.

Album two, titled simply 2, was announced for 22 September 2023 on Frictionless Music, the label the band still records for, and reached shops that autumn. It was a deliberate departure in the control room: production went to Gianluca Buccaletti, whose credits include Arlo Parks and Easy Life, with mastering by Heba Kadry, known for Beach House, Björk and Slowdive. The lead single Mercy had gone out the previous October; King Of My Head followed with the announcement. The band toured it heavily from April to November 2023 and played TRNSMT in Glasgow that July.

Between 2 and the new record the band kept releasing singles rather than albums, among them Carefree, Inaction and Walk A Mile In Gaza, the last of those placing the band's position on Israel and Palestine on the record under its own title.

Explicit Agitation: eleven tracks, Castle of Doom, February 2027

The third album, Explicit Agitation, was announced in September 2026 for release on 12 February 2027 via Frictionless Music. It runs to eleven tracks and was made at Mogwai's Castle of Doom Studios in Glasgow with Chris Marshall, the producer who made the debut — a return Welsh has framed as an attempt to get back the urgency, tightness and drive of the first record while handling more complicated songwriting than he was writing in 2019.

The songs were written by Welsh with Corlett and Holmes, with further contributions from McBride, Eryn Rae and Chris Small, and a guest appearance from PAQUE. Two tracks are already out as a double A-side: Run Down Small Town, the East Kilbride song, and City Used To Be Alive, which Welsh produced and mixed alone for the first time and has described as a companion piece to the band's earlier Aw The Time.

Welsh has been explicit about the stylistic reach, naming Kendrick Lamar and Rage Against The Machine alongside Nile Rodgers and Alex Turner, which accounts for a record that moves between hard guitar passages and rhythm-led material rather than sitting in one register. On the title, he told Science of Noise on 23 September 2026 that it reads both ways — he is explicitly agitating, and therefore implicitly agitated.

The subject matter is wider than the politics suggests. Welsh describes an album that takes in love, loneliness and lost faith as well as the Spanish Civil War, the relationship between labour and capital, and post-industrial towns, and he has said the point is confrontation with arguments, thoughts, people and places in equal measure rather than instruction.

The tour that arrives five months before the album

The current run opened at Saint Luke's in Glasgow on 24 September 2026 and continued through Cabaret Voltaire in Edinburgh on 26 September, Little Buildings in Newcastle on 27 September, FAC251 in Manchester on 29 September and the Hallamshire Hotel in Sheffield — doors at 19:30, over-18s — on 30 September. October takes in the Lending Room in Leeds on the 1st, the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham on the 2nd, the Bodega in Nottingham on the 4th, Rough Trade Bristol on the 5th and The Grace in London on the 6th.

The European leg is the larger half: Artheater in Cologne on 8 October, Molotow in Hamburg on the 10th, Beta in Copenhagen on the 11th, Badehaus in Berlin on the 13th, Hydrozagadka in Warsaw on the 14th, Strom in Munich on the 16th, Chelsea in Vienna on the 18th, Nachtleben in Frankfurt on the 20th, Le Chinois in Montreuil on the 22nd, Le Ferrailleur in Nantes on the 23rd, Wolf in Barcelona on the 24th and Sala El Sol in Madrid on the 25th. Twenty-five-plus dates in total.

The sequencing is unusual and worth stating plainly: the band is playing a full UK and European headline tour roughly five months ahead of the album it supports, with two songs from it available to the audience. It also marks a deliberate step down in room size. The band has headlined Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom twice, played Glastonbury and TRNSMT, supported The Reytons and Twin Atlantic, and passed sixteen million streams; this routing puts them back into clubs holding a few hundred.

What Welsh now claims for the songs

The most interesting shift around this record is a lowering of the stakes Welsh sets for his own work. Speaking to Science of Noise in September 2026, he said he is not confident in art's ability to change legislation, but that art can be the step before those things — and that a song differs from a political speech because melody and rhythm make it immersive and persuasive in a way a speech is not. What he wants is something worth engaging with intellectually and emotionally, not a lecture set to guitars.

That reads as a correction of the band's earlier posture rather than a retreat from it. The album still carries the material it always carried; what has gone is the claim that the material is going to fix anything by itself. On the live side his standard is simpler and has not moved: he owes the room a performance, he intends the night to run on dancing, moshing and singing, and he wants people to leave energised about being alive.