UK cult widescreen Britpoppers Rialto are excited to announce their first new album in 24 years, "Neon & Ghost Signs" released via Fierce Panda Records in April 2025! Theirs is a reunion spurred on not so much by a longing for the past as an urgency to grab the best of life while they can.

Six years ago, while holidaying in Spain, singer and song-writer Louis Eliot was rushed to hospital for extreme emergency surgery, mere hours from death.

His full recovery was an epiphany. "What you might think is if you have a very close to death experience you want to start looking after yourself," he says.

"I just went chasing full speed after my youth. I was just like, fuck it, I might not be here next week, I'm just going to dive in." Part of Eliot's rebirth involved leaving behind a long-term relationship to immerse himself once more in London's late-night party scene.

Part of it was the romance and anguish he found there. And part of it was realising that the songs that were emerging from this period - songs of love and loss, hedonism and regret, set in wistful witching hours - were a call from the past.

In intended cheesy clubland mode, Neon and Ghost Signs opens with `No One Leaves This Discoteque Alive'.

Louis Eliot casting himself as "the hound of London town, where the sheets are stained with gold" in a lascivious Brel growl, out to "lose my head" and find love "in a perfect storm".

It's a nocturnal party prowl that the album pursues with a passion. Rialto were a chart-topping, double-Platinum success in SE Asia and a highly acclaimed cult concern in the UK, but undoubtedly a band ahead of their aesthetic time.

Following second album Night on Earth in 2001 the band split and Eliot spread his wings.

He became a regular collaborator with Grace Jones and Supergrass's Danny Goffey; as a songwriter his credits included the Ivor Novello winning `Leave Right Now' for Will Young; he released a 2004 solo album and "a very rural sounding record" as Louis Eliot And The Embers in 2010, and developed the 8,000 capacity Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall.

Coloured LP, CD & MC available