“I was being humble, I bet," says James Marriott. We're asking about the first time Dork met him. It was almost two years ago, tucked away in the back of a Brighton café so as not to be seen by the hundreds of fans already queuing up in Jubilee Square for his debut at The Great Escape, where he made the preposterous claim that he was still learning to play guitar. More fool us, we printed it.

"I've been playing guitar for like 15 years. But I think when stuff was happening early doors, it was like, 'Well, I'm just a guy', you know? I'm just a guy who's got-" he interrupts himself. "I own like 15 guitars."

Previous fibs cleared up, he remembers that interview well, recounting incredible details back to us down to what outfit he was wearing. It's an unbelievable feat considering all of the much more exciting things that have happened for James since, but it stands out as the start of 'it all'.

"That was kind of the beginning," he recalls. "I'd done my first real tour. We were coming into a few festivals that summer. We were going to play Reading & Leeds for the first time. We were finishing off the first album."

Looking back at those early shows, there was a certain magic in watching an artist and their audience find their feet together. "I remember at that gig, someone did a row pit. The audience was still finding themselves in terms of what these gigs mean, and what kind of crowd is the crowd going to be?" he recalls. "It's not just any 150 people. It's my 150 people, and they're here to start rowing in a mosh pit. It was special, really special."

"That show ended up being great fun," he admits. "At the end of it, we snuck out the back and went for pizza because there's a Pizza Express right outside of that venue. And it was like, nobody knows that we're still here, just getting pizza outside. It felt like that was the beginning of me coming into my own in terms of being a performer on stage. It's been a bit of a whirlwind since then."

That whirlwind has taken him from bedroom pop-culture commentary to arena-ready indie-pop anthems, a transition that feels both unlikely and somehow inevitable. After all, who better to craft the perfect indie banger than someone who spent years dissecting what makes music click with an audience of millions online? The journey here reads like a connect-the-dots drawn by someone who's had too much fizzy pop. Born in Switzerland but raised in Buckinghamshire, Marriott's path to musical stardom started with, of all things, seeing an ABBA tribute band [Presumably, this isn't also a lie - Ed]. These days, his musical references skew more obviously towards The Strokes and Foals than 'Dancing Queen', but that early exposure to pure, unabashed pop theatricality clearly left its mark.

Even now, James is, of course, playing it down again – "What's less than a star? Like a pop constellation [Isn't that bigger? - Astronomy Ed]. I'm around and about if you look close enough," he says. The Reading & Leeds performances were a casual opening of the Main Stage. The album 'Are We There Yet?' was released independently in November 2023 and charted at Number 17 in the UK. 2024 saw him hit the road again and took him to the other side of the world for his first Australia and New Zealand tour. More importantly, he's been harbouring a huge secret, and it's that he's actually had his second album finished since July.

"It's definitely the longest I've had an album finished, and I've not spoken about it," he glows. "Which, you know, big pat on the back. That's pretty wild for me."

There's little to reveal at the moment, but it's called 'Don't Tell The Dog'; he'd spent over a year writing and collecting songs, with one of them dating back two years, and it was recorded and produced in three weeks down at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate (he notes this place has a slide, which thanks to being very squeaky, gets sampled in one of the songs). The recording process itself sounds like the indie equivalent of summer camp - a playful approach to production that characterises much of the record – an album that's not afraid to turn everyday sounds into musical Easter eggs.

James immediately wins the award for the most annoying album delivery we've probably ever had when we receive our copy as one 40-minute-long file via WhatsApp with no further information attached, asking us instead to try to explain the tracks to him.

"I like being really difficult when people want to listen to my album," he says, sounding quite pleased with himself. "I think, in its earliest form, when people are discovering it for the first time, or I'm sending it around to different people, I know for a fact that there'll be people who like one song and don't really care for the rest of the album. That's just kind of the way that music is enjoyed now. But I always like to kind of throw it at people and go, there it is."

On 'Don't Tell The Dog', James Marriott finds himself more confident than before, offering up a cleaner and more direct record than his debut; simultaneously, he was less uptight about what he wanted it to be. He describes its lead single 'I Don't Want To Live Like This' as the most universal sound of the album, one which came as a sonic surprise to fans.

At its heart, the title and artwork – featuring a clay model of his childhood golden retriever, Jasper – emerge from a deeply personal place. "The first song talks about my fear of going outside," he explains, "and leaving the dog at home to do so." It's a particularly poignant vulnerability from someone who built their career on being watched.

"I wanted to take it in a direction that was a little bit less indie-rock and more indie-pop, just very subtly, because I felt there was a certain amount of 'Are We There Yet?' which was a bit self-indulgent; I wanted to make more rock music, whereas, in this one, I've been more open-minded in terms of keeping production a little bit more clean and poppy."

In this era, James is all about surprising people. The first single may sound like the album's common denominator, but what follows is a proposed left-turn. Penned at Chalk in Brighton, 'Toothache' (coming 'soon') is, in James' words, one of the more devastating songs he's written. "We wrote it in the green room before playing our show that night," he recalls. "I have this little snippet of it called 'phones on 1%' because I had a lyric, 'my phone was on 1%', which didn't make it, but the end of the song in that rough recording hasn't really changed since. That's always a good sign."

There's an intentional flip-flop between these big excitable bangers and crushing quieter moments throughout the record. At the end, he does the opposite.

"I'm used to listening to albums where the last song is this big triumphant moment, and I wanted the album to end on this idea of you using it to reflect on who you are as a person, or I used it to reflect on who I was as a person. I like the idea of having an album that is more poppy and has bubbly electronic moments and then ending it on just the most depressing song I've ever made. Because people are going to hear 'I Don't Want To Live Like This' and hear this kind of triumphant indie-pop song, and then 'Limbs' is going to hit them at the end of the album, they're going to go, oh my god, where did that come from?"

This ability to pivot from jubilant to melancholic speaks to James's unique bond with his audience – a connection built not just on his music but on years of online life, where fans have followed his every creative venture. It's a relationship forged in the digital space but tested in the real world, where both the silly and the serious find their place in his musical universe.

The transition from URL to IRL comes with its own unique dynamics, though. Where most acts cut their teeth in sticky-floored venues, James' journey started with a different kind of stage altogether. "The artists that come from the internet, their audiences are so used to seeing them online for X amount of time," he explains. "It's not like a band that comes up through the live scene, where you may see them live a couple of times at a festival or in a local bar. You have this audience of people who have been waiting to see an artist for a certain amount of time."

The result? When these digital natives finally hit the stage, it's actually a mass exodus from the internet. "Finally, he's actually doing something, and they've gone outside, and they've touched grass," he laughs. "It's us indoor artists that, I guess, have the audience of people who are really trying to make them leave the house as much as possible."

This digital-first approach gives James a unique perspective on the music industry. It may be a lesser-discussed topic, but he knows that the marketing is just as important as the music, with an obvious parallel between his ability to sell sand at the beach and having no problem shouting about his new music online.

"There is a kind of lottery system with a lot of this stuff; you gotta keep buying tickets to the success lottery in the music industry. It has less to do now with talent than it has to do with tenacity and artists who are willing not just to make art but to talk about their art nonstop for 12 months. In my mind, that's an equally commendable thing. If you spend months of your life, or years of your life, making something, you need to spend an equal amount of time or more telling people about it."

Thinking back to what some fellow ex-YouTubers (an image that tickles James) were up to a couple of years ago, supergroup Fizz's album 'The Secret To Life' comes to mind. The four-piece mainly acted on instinct when it came to songwriting, a method James is employing going forward.

"It's the job of the independent artist to show people that they can make albums and they can make art which is representative of them, and if someone else doesn't like it, that's kind of the point. Like, it's meant to be subjective. I wrote a song about a race car the other day. My mum made me go to Sunday school as a kid, and I had to do a drawing class. We had to draw what Jesus meant to us, and I drew a race car. And my mum took it to the person who was running the Sunday school and was like, why have you let him draw a race car? And she went, well, that isn't actually a race car. It's what your son perceives Jesus as. So I have a song now called 'Jesus is a Race Car'. It's like, yeah, why not?"

This kind of gleeful, convention-defying attitude isn't just about being different for the sake of it. It's about creating music that feels true to the person making it, even if that person happens to see the divine in drag racing. Beyond quirky songwriting, though, James has his eyes set on broader ambitions. He's keen on refining his production skills, and when we mention his soundscape, in general, being pretty FIFA soundtrack-core, he laughs, "That's one of the goals."

"I want to play as many shows in as many cities that I've never been to before," he offers, delving into another future ambition. "I went to Auckland, or Aotearoa, I think it's said in Maori, and someone gave me a Maori necklace, someone called Toa, which was such a unique thing to that place. It was like they gave me a piece of culture from that city, and it just made me feel so at home, almost. I feel like I left a piece of myself there that I will need to go back and collect at some point. And I want to have that in as many cities as possible."

As our chat winds down, Marriott's trademark self-deprecation gives way to something more reflective. "I'm noticing my sound maturing and myself maturing to a point where I just want to make music that represents me and stuff that I'll be proud of, and stuff that the people who helped me in making it will be proud of the rest of their lives."

It's a moment of unexpected gravity from someone who just spent ten minutes telling us about drawing cars. These days, the DIY spirit that powered his early releases has evolved into something more collaborative and more considered.

"The team has grown," he explains. "I feel cradled in a way that I've never felt cradled before. It's at the point now where I'm very fortunate to be surrounded by people who truly trust the way that I see my project."