The Balcony (album)
2014 album by Catfish and the Bottlemen
The Balcony is the debut studio album by Welsh indie rock band Catfish and the Bottlemen. It was released on 15 September 2014 in the United Kingdom by Island Records and 6 January 2015 in the United States by Communion Records. On 20 March 2015, The Balcony was awarded a Gold certification from the British Phonographic Industry. The album cover was designed by New York artist Tim Lahan who originally posted it to his Flickr account in 2009 and was subsequently contacted by the band.
The Balcony was nominated for the Welsh Music Prize 2014–15. As the band's second album The Ride was releasing, it was reported that The Balcony had sold 250,000 copies. In the United States, the album has sold 37,000 copies as of April 2016. In 2024, the band released a 10-year anniversary edition of the album, consisting of the album plus six bonus tracks.
Reception
Critical reception of the album was mixed, with review aggregator Metacritic giving it 52/100 based on 6 reviews. Writing for AllMusic, Scott Kerr gave it three and a half stars out of five, saying that McCann's "weathered and assured vocals" gave an impression of a more experienced band and that Billy Bibby provided "grand Johnny Marr-inspired guitar hooks that are unapologetically catchy, gritty, and full of swagger".
“The Balcony (album)” enters the record as 2014 album by Catfish and the Bottlemen. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Balcony, album and Catfish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18164243. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2015, 2009 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Balcony (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.