On the Rise
James Marriott

The Brighton-based Marriott has lived two lives at once: one offline, full of private memory and unresolved ache, and one online, where every misstep could be clipped, shared, and dissected in real time.

That duality saturates Don’t Tell the Dog, an album that draws as much from his adolescence as it does from his present. “I was kind of trying to reinterpret [attachment theory] through the lens of my childhood,” he says, “how certain abandonments and certain, you know, losses I experienced might affect what I go through today.”

Before he made records, Marriott was a familiar face online—quick with jokes, louder with opinions, charismatic in the way content culture rewards. “I'm quite a performative person,” he tells me. “I love talking about things I make. But with lyricism, a lot of what happens just happens.” That friction between the polished self and the impulsive, emotional one is everywhere on his second LP. These are songs that leave less room to hide. “There was a point where I thought: if I belt this note, no one can question it,” he says referring to his guttural vocal delivery on his debut record Are We There Yet?. “Now, I’m learning to be okay just… singing.”

And yet, Don’t Tell the Dog isn’t about arrival. It’s a record written from the middle of things, from the haze of therapy sessions, voice notes, and sleepless thoughts. “If I ever do regret how much I share, I can just go,” he says. “Just remove myself from the internet. But my albums, that’s something else.” In that way, these songs do more than document Marriott’s feelings, they sharpen them. They offer a strange, public kind of closure.

Therapy, for Marriott, doesn’t sit outside of that process. He describes a reverse dynamic, where songs end up illuminating feelings he struggles to access in sessions. “If I was struggling to talk in therapy about something, we’d go through a lyric I wrote that week,” he says. “It was a way of asking, ‘What is it I’m feeling?’” Sitting down with a pen and paper became more an act of self-defiance than discipline. “I’ll be writing something and then suddenly a line will just happen. It’s not planned. And then I sit with it, like, why did I write that?”

Songs like “Don’t Blame Me,” which he once wrote from a place of raw anger and betrayal, have since been softened by repetition, by connection. “I’ve had that visceral moment with a crowd over and over,” he explains. “And now I have such a different relationship with those feelings. I’ve dealt with it, and I’m fine with it.”

What’s striking is how deeply Marriott is willing to excavate. Don’t Tell the Dog is filled with references to childhood loss, fractured relationships, and unprocessed guilt. He isn’t afraid of being embarrassed by the music—that’s part of the process too. “Get embarrassing with it,” he says. “It can be really embarrassing when a video flops, or when you post something too honest. But no one remembers that a few days later.”

It’s a tightrope walk between sincerity and presentation. “I want to be fun on the internet and not take it too seriously,” he says. “But I also want to take my art seriously.” There’s a note of weariness in his voice. Perhaps the fatigue of trying to be understood in full colour when people are only ever given glimpses. He name-checks Troye Sivan, admiring the way the pop star disappeared from the internet to make heartfelt music. “It’s hard,” Marriott concedes. “Because I want to be both.”

There’s a particular vulnerability in putting art into the world knowing it might be received through the wrong lens. “People find out I make music and say, ‘Wait, the YouTube guy?’” he says, half-smiling. “But this year’s been different. It feels like there’s been a redefining of me as an artist.” He’s not trying to escape the past, he just wants people to meet him where he is now. And sometimes, that means playing a show and spotting someone in the crowd who doesn’t look convinced. “You can normally clock people who’ve been brought to my show and have already made up their mind. You’re here because you think it’s a joke. But by the end, you see them getting with it.”

For Marriott, contrast is a language for everything he’s still figuring out. A way of circling discomfort without naming it too quickly. “There’s this sad verse,” he explains of “Food Poisoning,” “where you kind of have a lyric about just denying this issue that you have. And in that denying of the issue, you strip back all the elements of the issue. And it sounds very clean all of a sudden.”

Writing through contradiction has become a kind of therapy, not because it resolves anything, but because it allows him to sit in the uncertainty. “Why don’t we switch it up completely and just Charlie Puth Light Switch it,” he says of the decision to make the chorus of “Food Poisoning” the most minimal part of the song. “We’d never done that before. I like that idea of having this sadness that suddenly just vanishes into something clean and empty.”

Even the recording process mirrors this tension. On “Limbs,” one of the most emotionally raw songs on Don’t Tell the Dog, Marriott intentionally left his vocals rough. “I didn’t want to train that song too hard,” he says. “I wanted it to sound a bit uneasy. That’s a sensitive thing to put yourself through—letting yourself sound broken.”=

There’s discomfort, too, in the choices he didn’t make. “I think every day about why I didn’t pick ‘Plasticine’ as a single,” he says with a laugh that doesn’t entirely mask the regret. “I went off it completely. But it’s part of the blood of the record. I made it with Kieran from Circa Waves, and it just came together in a few hours. The demo had this weird magic, and maybe I got too close to it.” Now, he hears that song mentioned in nearly every interview. “I swear to god if that song bombs I’m coming for the music media because you can’t all be wrong,” he laughs.

Marriott’s songwriting often hinges on tension. Both emotional and sonic. There’s a conscious push-and-pull in his arrangements: quiet verses that fall into dense, cathartic choruses; sweet melodies holding acidic lyrics. “I think the contrast between verse and chorus is something I’m really drawn to,” he says. “That dissonance is how I feel most days. Like I’m saying one thing and feeling another.”

That’s what makes his music feel intimate without being overly sentimental. The discomfort is never sanded down. He doesn’t always want to offer solutions, or even clarity. “Sometimes I write something and only later figure out what it meant,” he says. “It’s like a backdoor into my own brain. The chorus might be light, but what got us there wasn’t.”

On “Plasticine,” he sings of using claymation videos as a child to process loneliness. “I made little models growing up,” he says. “That’s how I connected with people. The internet became a way of dealing with that isolation.” Even the album’s title nods to an unresolved past: when Marriott moved as a kid, he left his family dog behind—and never saw them again.

The album splits like a vinyl record: Side A filled with narrative vignettes, Side B drifting into uncertainty. “The first half is like, I know exactly what happened. I’ve thought about it a lot. But then it's like, how does that define me?” he says. “The second half is me going: I don’t know. I’m still working it out.”

It’s an unusually honest depiction of emotional growth—not triumphant, not tied up with a bow. “I don’t think I’ve made up my mind on who I am,” Marriott admits. “And I think ending the album on that note is incredibly depressing, but it’s also an open ending.”

He doesn’t pretend to have answers, and that’s precisely the point. His songs don’t strive to fix you—they sit beside you while you fall apart. They’re jagged, unvarnished, and quietly devastating. “If I ever regret how vulnerable I’ve been,” he says, “I can always step away. But I think people connect with it because it’s real. It makes them feel a little more seen.”

The version of James Marriott that began this journey—the YouTube personality, the self-deprecating commentator—still lingers around the edges. But now, he’s something else entirely: a songwriter who has figured out how to turn feeling into form, discomfort into melody, and growing pains into a catalogue that resonates far beyond the screen.