Review By Glen Parkes
Some bands make an album. Others make a statement. With A Beautiful World To Lose, Corella have done the latter. This is a record that sounds like a band that has stopped asking whether they belong at the top table of British rock and decided instead that they are going to pull up their own chair. Fiercer, darker, more ambitious and considerably more emotionally exposed than their debut, Corella have taken everything that made Once Upon A Weekend exciting and turned the volume, intensity and songwriting up another few notches.
Released on 18 September 2026, A Beautiful World To Lose sees the Manchester four-piece – Joel Smith, Ben Henderson, Jack Taylor and James Fawcett – working with Grammy-winning producer Jason Perry, and the partnership has clearly pushed the band into new territory.
The result is ten tracks that crackle with energy.
Opening with “Rewire”, Corella waste absolutely no time announcing their intentions. Searing guitars, relentless drums and Joel Smith’s distinctive snarling vocal immediately establish the album’s darker edge. This isn’t indie rock designed to sit comfortably in the background. This is music with teeth.
“Rewire” also introduces one of the album’s biggest themes: frustration with the world around us. The song questions how people can become conditioned to think a certain way and challenges the listener to break that programming. It is politically charged without becoming preachy, and musically it hits with enough force to make its message impossible to ignore.
“What’s The Use” continues that feeling of frustration, with a racing guitar line seemingly always running ahead of Smith’s weary vocal. It captures that horrible feeling of trying to get your life back on track while wondering whether you’re actually getting anywhere. There is a genuine sense of generational frustration running through the track, and Corella turn that feeling into something cathartic.
Then comes “Lost A Friend”, arguably one of the album’s most important moments.
Here, the band drops some of the swagger and allows the vulnerability to take centre stage. Inspired partly by James Fawcett losing two friends to suicide in 2025, alongside Joel’s own experience of separation, the song deals with grief, heartbreak and the difficulty of finding your way through loss.
It is raw without becoming overly sentimental. And that’s where Corella have matured.
The band have openly spoken about wanting the new album to contain more grit and more heart, and that vulnerability is one of the record’s greatest strengths. There is a message here that men can talk about difficult emotions, support each other and find solace in music. In a genre that can sometimes hide behind bravado, Corella aren’t afraid to admit when things hurt.
“Simple Life” then lifts the mood with a huge, uplifting anthem that sounds tailor-made for festival crowds. This is Corella at their most immediate – soaring guitars, infectious melodies and a chorus that practically demands thousands of voices singing along.
That ability to move between darkness and euphoria is what makes the album work so well.
“Bitter End” follows with a sharper, more compact attack, while “All I Want” gives the band another opportunity to showcase their growing songwriting maturity. The album never loses its momentum, but neither does it become a collection of songs all chasing the same sound.
“Jump Scare” injects another dose of nervous energy before “Wolf” brings some of Corella’s most entertaining storytelling. The song creates a character who appears confident and swaggering on the outside but is riddled with insecurity underneath. It’s observational, recognisably Manchester and delivered with enough attitude to make the character immediately believable.
Then comes “Thunder Strike”, co-written with Circa Waves’ Kieran Shudall, and this is another standout. Menacing and restless, the track captures the strange mixture of anxiety, adrenaline, fear and excitement that comes with trying to build a career in music.
There is something almost addictive about the uncertainty described in the song. You reach one goal and immediately start wondering what comes next.
That hunger runs throughout A Beautiful World To Lose.
Corella have already experienced plenty of success. They have amassed more than 70 million streams since their debut, received support from Radio 1, Radio X and BBC Introducing, sold out headline shows across the UK and Europe, appeared on major festival stages including Reading & Leeds and toured with the likes of Kaiser Chiefs, Pale Waves, Circa Waves and The Wombats.
Yet there is absolutely no sense that they are resting on those achievements.
If anything, the opposite is true. The band sound hungry. Jason Perry’s production deserves considerable credit here. Rather than burying the band beneath layers of studio trickery, the approach appears to have been about stripping things back and allowing the songs and musicianship to breathe. In an era increasingly dominated by artificial and computer-generated music, there is something refreshing about hearing a band embrace the imperfections and authenticity of four people playing together.
You can hear the musicianship. You can hear the energy. Most importantly, you can hear the personality.
“Note To Self” brings the album towards its conclusion, and by this point the journey has become clear. A Beautiful World To Lose is about recognising that the world can be frustrating, frightening and sometimes brutally unfair, but refusing to simply surrender to it.
That is ultimately what Corella are saying. Keep going. Have each other’s backs. Challenge what you’re told. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. And when things go wrong, get back up. There is a fascinating contradiction at the heart of this record. The title suggests losing something beautiful, while the music repeatedly finds reasons to keep fighting for it. The darker themes of environmental anxiety, political frustration, heartbreak, loss and disillusionment are balanced by friendship, love, hope and the sheer joy of playing in a rock band.
That makes A Beautiful World To Lose much more than another collection of indie-rock songs.
It feels like a snapshot of where Corella are right now – four musicians who have grown up, been tested by life, learned from their experiences and come out the other side determined to make their best record yet. And they have. Corella have taken the influences of bands such as Bloc Party, Foals and The Maccabees, thrown them into their own Manchester musical blender and come out with something that sounds increasingly like Corella and nobody else.
This is a band ready for the next level.
A Beautiful World To Lose is bigger, bolder and braver than what came before it. It has the riffs to fill arenas, the choruses to conquer festivals and enough emotional depth to keep listeners coming back long after the final note.
And if this is what the next chapter sounds like, Manchester’s four-piece may have just produced the record that takes them from promising contenders to serious players.
Corella aren’t simply riding the current rock resurgence – they are helping drive it.
A fierce, emotionally charged and hugely confident second album. Corella have found the perfect balance between indie swagger, rock power and genuine vulnerability. A Beautiful World To Lose doesn’t just show how far they’ve come – it makes you very excited about where they’re going next.
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