Decca Records have announced that they will release comedian Adam Buxton’s debut music album ‘Buckle Up’, both digitally and on vinyl.

The album, which sees Buxton collaborating with Metronomy’s Joe Mount (as lead producer) and producer Pete Robertson (Beabadoobee, Jane’s Addiction, The Vaccines), is set for release on Friday 12th September 2025. You can pre-order the album on vinyl and pre-save it on streaming services here. There will be an album launch event at London’s Rough Trade East on Wednesday 17th September.

Also released today (Wednesday 28th May) is the album’s lead single ‘Pizza Time’!

Pizza Time – mixed by Joe Mount and produced and performed by Pete Robertson - is a hymn to his teenage son Nat, whom he’d often find standing in a bathrobe next to the oven watching a pizza cook at 11 in the morning. A coming-of-age song – and a getting old song – of wondrous economy.

You can stream Pizza Time here. There is also an accompanying visualiser, made by Guy Larsen, who Buxton has most recently collaborated with on the Up In Smoke podcast, for which they received a nomination for The Webby Awards for Scripted Fiction. Watch the Pizza Time visualiser here!

On the announcement of his debut album, Buxton joked: “I don’t actually consider this actual music. One of the album titles I considered was ‘Adjacent To Music’, because every single bit of music that I’ve listened to, in my mind, is better qualified to be considered music than this.”

Buxton, our most beloved podcaster, veteran of GarageBand and the jingle, will never be a rockstar. As Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood said, when Adam sent him the demo for Pizza Time from Buckle Up, “I think you’re hamstrung by your limitations on the guitar.” But he won’t give up. Never. Even though his playing isn’t what he wants it to be.

When Decca approached Buxton to make his first solo album, five years ago, the label didn’t realise they were dealing with a “master of self-deluded overcomplication”. He told them he wanted “Berlin-period Bowie and Eno going for lunch with Radiohead and Nina Simone at Brian Wilson’s beach brasserie.” He told them he wanted a Bulgarian choir, too. Then he enlisted Metronomy’s Joe Mount as producer: “I hoped it would be a Metronomy record with my voice!” None of these plans materialised.

Instead came Buckle Up, fifteen songs in which Buxton is inescapably, and beautifully, himself. Commenting on Buxton’s lyrics, Greenwood noted that they sometimes inhabited “the uncanny valley between funny and sincere,” and though it wasn’t necessarily meant as a compliment, Buxton has come to accept that the uneasy balance between heartfelt and silly might be what he does best.

With the majority of the album produced and mixed by Metronomy’s Joe Mount, Buxton would go to Mount’s Kent studio every few months in 2023, and they’d build upon one of Buxton’s demos or reconstruct one of his songs from scratch. “I did my best to listen to Joe when he resisted my more unrealistically ambitious ideas. I have collaborated successfully so seldomly, I really tried hard to be led by him.” Mount would provide instrumentation, and occasionally Buxton would add incompetent instrumentation of his own.

Whether it’s Skip This Track (a country ditty about not sharing the same musical taste as your partner), Tea Towel (a 1970s bossa nova number about the absorbency, or lack, of modern dishcloths), or My Feelings (the ironic Hunky Dory-inspired track exploring Buxton’s worries about “prioritising my emotions in a way my parents’ generation would have disapproved of”), every number on Buckle Up is about more than it seems to be.

Buxton has a natural ear for amusing instrumentation, as evidenced by decades of jingles for his shows – a farty bit of synth, a spindly riff. And there is a strong flavour of jingles on the album too, in I Grated My Thumb (“I grated my thumb while zesting lime for lunch today”) and on Have U Seen My Phone Charger which, like the impressionistic Betjeman Notes, was inspired by Buxton’s late father.

In short, Buckle Up is about everything: it is about whether a middle-aged man should be wearing shorts (Shorts), but it is also about accepting who and what you are. “At some point you have to get over it: this is what you’re good at, this is what you should do,” says Buxton. “You don’t want to be tortured by what Phillip Pullman called the Phase Space - the spectrum of possibilities available to you when you begin a project. It’s very easy to be paralysed by that – in life, too.”

But it’s hard to shut down the imposter syndrome completely. “The more music I listen to,” says Buxton, “the more I strongly feel that I have no right to be near a record contract, especially when there are so many talented people who would love to have one!”

Metronomy’s Joe Mount said: “I loved making this record with Adam and am very proud of my involvement in it. We chatted about artists like Ween, The Rutles, Eric Idle and Harry Nilsson whilst recording and I would often think to myself “what would a car full of teenagers enjoy hearing”. Hopefully we’ve made something a car full of teenagers will enjoy”.

The release of Buxton’s album is a modern-day illustration of Decca Records’ longstanding association with comedy, dating back to the label’s foundations in the 1930s.