The Band: RIALTO

The Release: 'NEON & GHOST SIGNS'

The Format: DIGITAL SINGLE

The Release Date: APRIL 14TH 2025

The Digital Link: orcd.co/neon_ghost_signs_single

The truth: Rialto share the title track from their forthcoming album ‘Neon & Ghost Signs’, their first in 24 years, which will be released via Fierce Panda Records on the 25th of April 2025. It's very much a case of like single, like album...

"'Neon & Ghost Signs' is about reminiscing of nights in the city and looking forward to more.” explains centrifugal creative force Louis Eliot. “A hedonistic embrace and leaning on each other in the dawn / morning, these are the shared experiences that bond us and keep us connected through good times and hard times, they create a you and me against the world mentality. Love and friendship forever."

The album will be available to stream/download on all digital platforms as well as on Limited Edition Indie Store Exclusive 'Transparent Green Glow In The Dark' Vinyl, 'White' Colour Vinyl, Limited Edition 'Transparent Neon Pink' Vinyl, Compact Disc and Cassette.

The Album was produced by Tam Johnstone and Louis Eliot and mixed by Cenzo Townsend. Rialto embark on a string of instore shows the week of release and then headline London’s Scala on May 14th, with candid support from label mates Desperate Journalist.

In this sordid clubland mode, 'Neon & Ghost Signs' opens with ‘No One Leaves This Discotheque Alive’, 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, through the twanging 'Car That Never Comes' and the exquisitely regretful 'Remembering To Forget'. For 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.”

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.

Rialto were a chart-topping, double-platinum success in SE Asia and a highly acclaimed cult concern in the UK thanks to their lavishly bruised self-titled debut album in 1998. But they were undoubtedly a band ahead of their aesthetic time, and definitively skewered by their label going bust a month before release. Following a second album, 'Night on Earth', in 2001 Rialto 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. Still, apart from that...

Go feel Rialto for real at these dates here:
27th April | Rough Trade, Bristol (Instore Show)
28th April | Rough Trade, Nottingham (Instore Show)
29th April | Rough Trade, Liverpool (Instore Show)
30th April | Rough Trade East, London (Instore Show)
1st May | Banquet Records, Kingston (Instore Show)
14th   May | Scala, London  (Headline Show)