Valtos & Friends

Valtos are back at the O2 Academy Glasgow on Friday 18 December, with this one billed as the biggest Valtos & Friends night yet. It's the second part of their Valtos & Friends tour, and for anyone who caught their 2024 show at SWG3, this is the long-awaited follow-up. They'll be joined onstage by a full live band, with special guests and surprise collaborations expected throughout the night.

Valtos are Skye natives Daniel Docherty and Martyn MacDonald, a duo that works across the trad and electronic worlds. Their self-titled debut album came out in June 2022 and brought in a long list of collaborators: Donnie Munro of Runrig, Lana Pheutan, Eilidh Cormack from Sian, Gary Innes of Mànran, Euan McLaughlin of An Dannsa Dub, and Allan MacDonald of Niteworks. It did more than just gather names, too, racking up over 100,000 streams in its first few weeks.

Over 2023 and 2024, the Valtos & Friends project released twelve new singles, which eventually came together as the album Valtos & Friends, released in early 2025. That's the material this tour is built around, so you'll hear those songs played out with a full band behind them rather than just the two of them. The duo has picked up a fair bit of recognition along the way: they won Up and Coming Artist of the Year in 2022, made the finals of BBC Introducing Scottish Act of the Year, and were nominated for Best Live Act 2023 at The Scots Trad Awards.

Doors open at 19:00, with a curfew of 23:00. It's a Friday night in the city, and with the special guests and surprise collaborations they're hinting at, it's one of those nights where the full line-up doesn't really reveal itself until the music starts.