Alton After Dark

Alton After Dark is the whole park at night, turned into music. I am Joseph Laurence, a UK songwriter and composer, and this is the album I have wanted to write for as long as I have loved the place. Where my single caught one ride in the summer light, this record waits for the sun to drop and the whole valley to change - the crowds thinning, the lanterns catching, the woods going deep and blue, and the fireworks tearing the sky open above the trees.

It is a love letter to the after-dark version of Alton Towers, the one that lives half in memory and half in the imagination: the Wicker Man glowing against the night, the Victorian gardens lit like something out of a fairy tale, and the Runaway Mine Train rattling off into the dark long after the last train of the day. I wanted to score the feeling of the park once the lights go low - the wonder, the mischief, the little shiver of it.

So this is a whole album written to live in that hour. Music for the walk down through the gardens at dusk, for the moment the first firework goes up, and for the strange, wonderful quiet of a place like this after everyone has gone home.

Musically it is the most cinematic and the most nocturnal of my records. Warm, widescreen orchestration with a little gothic edge - candlelit strings, low brass that rolls in like the dark coming down over the woods, choirs that lift into something euphoric when the fireworks finally go up. It is beautiful and a bit haunted, the way the best after-dark places always are.

It moves the way an evening at the park moves: the hush of the gardens at dusk, the slow build as the light fades, and then the release - the sky lit up, the drop of a coaster in the dark, the grin you cannot help. There is warmth all the way through it, and under the warmth a low, gothic shimmer, because after dark everything is a touch more magical and a touch more strange.

My single The Runaway Mine Train caught one ride I have loved my whole life, in the gold of a summer day. Alton After Dark widens the lens to the whole park, and waits for night to fall. If The Runaway Mine Train was the perfect day out, this is the perfect evening - the same place, the same love for it, seen once the lights go low.

You will hear the ride return here too, the Runaway Mine Train rattling off into the dark as one thread in a bigger, nocturnal story. It is the natural next step: from one song about one coaster to a full cinematic album about the whole park after closing, as I imagine it.

Alton After Dark arrives on 30 September 2026, and you can step into it early. Unmastered previews of every track are on SoundCloud now, with more going public as release day nears - the whole album taking shape in the dark before it is finished.

Want to know the moment the finished record lands? Follow Joseph Laurence wherever you listen and the release will reach you first - no need to keep checking back.

No. Alton After Dark is an independent album inspired by Alton Towers after dark - it is not an official Alton Towers release and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or commissioned by Alton Towers or Merlin Entertainments. It is one fan's love letter to the place, written from scratch and released under my own name, Joseph Laurence.

It is true that, to my absolute delight, Alton Towers have had my single The Runaway Mine Train playing in their office - but that was a fan's song finding its way home, not a commission, and this album is no different. Alton After Dark is inspired by the park; it is not made for it or by it. Same place, same love for it, entirely my own songs.