School Disco have always been a live band first — the kind of outfit that makes sense at volume, in the dark, in a room that's slightly too warm. 'SD IV', their fourth album and first for Krautpop!, doesn't try to argue otherwise. Recorded mostly live at Farm Road Studios with minimal overdubs, it captures something that over-produced psych records routinely lose: the feeling that the music is actually happening, that there are four people in a room deciding in real time how far to push it.
What's striking about the record is how comfortably it wears its ambition. Three of the seven tracks clear the eight-minute mark — 'Open', 'What You Do, You Say', and the closing 'No One His God' — and none of them feel long. 'Open' drifts in on a slow psychedelic tide, unhurried and deliberate, setting a tone of patient intensity that the album sustains across its full runtime. 'What You Do, You Say' is the centrepiece, heavy fuzz guitar and washy psychedelia pulling in opposite directions until something gives, and when it does it genuinely lands. 'No One His God' builds from near-silence into a crashing, cathartic close that earns every second of its running time.
The shorter tracks do real work in between. 'Happen' takes a jazzier turn that briefly opens a window before the mood closes back in. 'Messiah of Evil' sits comfortably in Beatles-psych territory, melodic and slightly unnerving. 'The Bottom' is the album's most meditative moment — desert-slow, emotionally exposed, and the track that probably reveals most about where the band's head is at. 'Simulation III', all dappled electronics and quiet unease, feels like a transmission from somewhere slightly off the dial.
The reference points are worn openly — Pink Floyd around Meddle, CAN, King Crimson, the fuzz-heavy end of Black Sabbath — but 'SD IV' never feels like pastiche. School Disco sound like a band who have absorbed all of that and come out the other side with something genuinely theirs: hypnotic, brooding, and built for a particular kind of listener who doesn't mind getting a little lost on the way somewhere. A strong record, and their best yet.
Stream the collection in the player below
