Welcome to The Parlour: Picture Parlour exclusively introduce their self-affirming debut album
In 2023, Picture Parlour were dubbed the next big thing.
As they released their first ever single, only a few months after moving to London and playing their first ever gig, the storm of the music industry hit them full force when it somewhat randomly decided they were the new stars. Swooped up in a whirlwind, the band themselves hated it.
That sounds ungrateful, but it’s not like that at all. Pause and imagine it for a second: you’ve just moved to London, you don’t really know anyone, you’ve only just found a drummer and a bassist, and booked your first gig at The Windmill because it seems like a good place to start.
Then suddenly, Courtney Love tweets about you and within weeks, the hype machine is deafening, and as it seems as random to them as it was to you, the classic industry plant accusations are flying while the industry itself is smothering you with offers only focused on a quick and fleeting buck. On the surface, that sounds like the stuff of dreams, but when it happens, like it did to Katherine Parlour and Ella Risi, it isn’t.
“What the hell is going on? You open the door, and it felt like we peek through, and everything was just on fire. And we were like, ‘No, close that door,’” Parlour told Far Out of that moment. “We’re not actually sure that we want to go in there.”
It’s not that the band didn’t and don’t have grand dreams of that kind of attention. It is simply that when it happened, before they’d even really put out a song, it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like it was about them or the music, as the band said, “Do you know what it was? I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make me feel comfortable or feel in control. And I think I was just like, something about this doesn’t feel like it’s meant to be for us.”
In the years since, that stance has made more and more sense. They released ‘Norwegian Wood’ during that initial onslaught, and then began to take their time, waiting until 2024 to share their debut EP, Face In The Picture; four tracks that showed already how much they’d matured and how much their entire artistic world benefitted from slowing things down to be considerate.
When they returned again in 2025 with a scattering of singles, each accompanied by cinematic visuals and each boasting a more and more elevated sound, it was clear that Picture Parlour were not a band here to be a trending fad. They’re a band set on building and building and building. Since the start, they’d been building towards this sentence – on November 14th, Picture Parlour will release their debut album, The Parlour.
“I think with an album, it feels like this huge, kind of like mythical thing,” Parlour said as the singer and guitarist truly beam each and every time the word is mentioned. She added, “With an album, I want to hang this on my wall for the rest of my life, and when I’m old, I want it to be dusty in the corner of the room, and I want to look at it and be like, ‘Fuck, we did that.’”
And that type of artistry doesn’t come from rushing something out when the blinding lights of hype hit you – luckily for them, they could sense that. “I feel like every decision you make as an artist is thinking about how will this affect me in the future? Will I have longevity?” Parlour explained as the wisdom that encouraged them to ignore the noise and even turn down a lot of the offers the sudden buzz pushed their way.
“You can go anywhere in the world, and there’s still something that you can find that like feels like it belongs to you.”
Katherine Parlour
“We felt like we wanted to take a minute and figure out, like, what our band should look like, what it should sound like, what we want to be and and luckily, I think it paid off, because we’re still here, and we we’ve got an album coming out, so it was a risk,” Parlour said, with Risi finishing her sentence. “That we’re super proud of.”
The reason why it’s likely paid off is that the band decided to take a minute in order to keep getting better. “I knew with my skill as a songwriter, like I hadn’t even scratched the surface,” Katherine Parlour admitted, “So I remember saying to Ella, we should be taking time to delve into that, take a minute to get better.”
To do so, they wandered between London, Liverpool, Manchester, LA and Nashville, getting to work with some of their all-time heroes, like Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado.
But anywhere they went to work, they were always really in the same place: The Parlour, a kind of mental space that held and encapsulated the creative partnership between Parlour and Risi. Named after the place they first met in Manchester, it’s a representation of these vital community spaces where people can collide, find people with similar interests and find new interests through them.
“Even though we were in a place we’d never been to before, and it was the total opposite kind of culture to where me and Ella are from, it still somehow felt like we were finding people and sounds and like just visuals there that felt like The Parlour, which was so interesting to me,” Parlour explained.
Specifically, Risi and Parlour’s space is Lynchian red, filled with the sound of feet dancing northern soul and bodies dressed in 1960s and ‘70s attire. There’s a trippiness to it as Risi references The Holy Mountain and how their early experiences in the industry felt like the meta ending to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s flick, or even The Truman Show, “Where everybody else is in on the gag, and then you pan out and you see it for what it is,” she says.
But mostly, and vitally, The Parlour feels like an independent venue, influenced mostly greatly by all of the local and independent venues that have shaped and nurtured the band, from The Ruby Lounge in Manchester, where it all began, to The Windmill that launched them, to the countless venues they hit on their recent tour supporting Music Venue Trust.
“It’s that friendly, genuine sort of care and nurture of the industry, that it’s nice to still see that it’s still there,” Risi recalls of the healing energy of these vital spaces. “They’re always the most generous venues as well, for sure.”
Matching the aesthetic with that kind of genuine community energy, that’s The Parlour – the place where the band have resided as they built the record named after it. “It’s really been like therapy for us, and it’s like a safe space, isn’t it, really, which is cheesy, but it’s the fucking truth,” Parlour said, talking about this mental space that’s held them amidst the craziness.
Now, as they emerge with the record in hand and a vision as clear and strong as they always knew it could be, the knowledge that they made the right call is crystal. “That’s why this whole process the past year has been so cathartic, in a way, because it really has been like regaining control again. And it’s affirming that we did the right thing in the beginning.”
