Something Real review | The Guest List reject the algorithm that made them

The Guest List built their name on TikTok, racking up millions of likes for high-energy indie covers before they’d written much of their own material. Something Real, their debut, is in large part a rejection of the exact culture that got them there: a whole record aimed at algorithmic outrage, digital division and the pressure to turn yourself into content. It’s a strange, pointed thing for a band who owe their audience to the algorithm in the first place.

The Manchester five-piece, Cai Alty, Tom Quigley, Leio Hunter, Sid Wallace and Angus Gilchrist, left the city to record in Bergen with producer Matias Tellez, with The Coral’s James Skelly co-producing. Eleven tracks, and a lot to get through: mental health, male suicide, domestic abuse, climate anxiety, social division, mostly delivered without pretending to have the answers.

The record opens with a direct hit at the algorithm itself, war treated as content and controversy as currency: War is on trend… the controversy wins once again, before ‘Slow Down Sally’ strips everything back to acoustic guitar and Alty’s voice for a specific story: a young woman navigating a controlling, stalkerish relationship, the fear rendered in detail rather than in slogans.

‘Craven’ swings the other way entirely, four guitars stacked into a huge, climbing solo, the album’s clearest guitar-band showcase and proof the band can still just play when the subject matter allows it.

Not every big theme gets that same specificity, though. ‘Weatherman’ takes on climate anxiety in broad strokes that could belong to any number of records currently doing the same thing, generic exactly where ‘Slow Down Sally’ was precise. It’s the one place the album’s reach for everything outruns its grip on anything specific.

Closer ‘The Only Ones’ pulls the record back together, offering the comfort of shared struggle rather than isolation, a fitting way to end an album this determined to actually mean something. Whether The Guest List have truly escaped the algorithm or just found heavier subject matter to feed it is a fair question. On this evidence, they’ve at least earned the right to ask it themselves.

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