Joe McElderry has been a fixture of UK pop since winning The X Factor’s sixth series in 2009, a run that included a chart-topping debut single, five UK Top 20 albums, and a parallel career in musical theatre that’s taken him through roles in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Tommy: The Rock Opera. “Love Me Out Loud”, out June 19th, marks a return after a run of releases spanning pop, classical crossover and theatre work, and it leans hard into disco-pop territory, a genre well suited to McElderry’s theatrical instincts and powerhouse vocal range.
The song is built around a familiar but well-executed premise: turning heartbreak into something danceable rather than mopey. Pulsating disco rhythm, twinkling synths, and sweeping strings give the track an unmistakably 1970s-inspired backbone, while the production stays modern enough to avoid feeling like straight pastiche. That’s a difficult line to walk in disco-revival pop; leaning too hard into nostalgia risks feeling like a costume, while too much modern polish drains the genre of its warmth, and “Love Me Out Loud” mostly finds the right balance between the two.
Where the track earns its emotional stakes is in McElderry’s vocal performance, which brings real dramatic instinct to a song that could otherwise read as a fairly straightforward breakup anthem. His background in musical theatre shows up clearly in how the track builds, atmospheric and restrained at the start before the chorus opens up into something considerably bigger, giving the frustration and longing in the lyrics somewhere to actually land rather than just repeating a hook at full volume from the first bar.
For an artist with this much range across pop, classical crossover and theatre already behind him, “Love Me Out Loud” plays to McElderry’s clearest strength: big, emotionally direct vocal performances wrapped in a genuinely catchy pop structure. It’s not reinventing disco-pop, but it doesn’t need to; the song does exactly what a good comeback single should, reminding listeners what made McElderry’s voice stand out in the first place while pointing toward a genuinely fun, danceable new chapter.