Manchester Producer Werkha Explores Scoliosis in His New Album

Pain bends the body, but music can straighten the soul. The first time Tom Leah felt his body tilt against the world, he learned how to listen differently. Under the Moniker Werkha, the Manchester-based multi-instrumentalist, DJ, and producer has long stitched rhythm from the textures of life. But with Unsung Irregular, his new album on First Word Records, he transforms the contours of scoliosis into sound; the ache, the sway, the hush of unspoken battles, and the relief of movement becoming a language of its own. Werkha transforms hidden disability into rhythm. The result is an album as intimate as a scar, weaving discomfort into soundscapes that pulse with resilience, honesty, and celebrate the healing power of movement, imperfect bodies in perfect motion. Let’s look at how Manchester Producer Werkha Explores Scoliosis in His New Album. and read his exclusive answers to our unique questions below.

Scoliosis is an abnormal sideways curvature of the spine that can create visible asymmetry in the shoulders, hips, or ribcage and often leads to back pain or reduced mobility. Because the spine plays a central role in posture, balance, and flexibility, scoliosis can affect how a person moves, altering gait, limiting range of motion, and sometimes making everyday activities more physically demanding

Hidden Conditions, Heard Clearly

“I don’t outwardly use my own vocals on records, so I reach for different sounds and instruments to represent the stories I want to tell.”

Werkha

Werkha does not sing his stories in the usual way. The choice lands with quiet force across the record’s 11 tracks, each one approaching hidden disability not as a confession but as a living environment, rooms of sensation, memory, and release. Scoliosis leaves marks both visible and invisible; the album traces them with unflinching honesty, then turns them into movement. It’s not a diary of chronic pain so much as a practice of reclaiming rhythm, proof that bodies can sing without words, and that irregularities can become the pulse a listener leans towards.

“As an album title, Unsung Irregular is an anchor point that brings together a lot of the meaning behind each individual track… It’s a meeting of beauty and a mishap of the form, an irregularity that I hope I can give a voice to.”

Werkha

Sound as Geography, Collaboration as Care

The process of healing is written into the album’s architecture. Field recordings surface like weather; processed vocal textures carry the grain of breath; geographical references sketch the terrain that shaped him.

“There’s a vocoder I used on a sample of my voice on By Helm… I used that same texture sidechained to kit in Weak Point… Linking the two tracks this way brings them into the same world.”

Werkha

Even pain becomes material. Alongside this sonic craftsmanship, the album welcomes vocalists Daudi Matsiko and Rioghnach Connolly, artists whose folk roots resonate with Wekha’s nature-led tectures. Their contributions feel less like features and more like acts of care, voices that widen the album’s community while keeping its storytelling close to the bone.

“Some of these motifs and sounds are quite subtle. By Helm opens with a biting synth that represents the ‘Helm Wind’ that rushes down Cross Fell in Cumbria… On S-Bend, I disguised samples of my own screams to reference the pain that scoliosis can cause.”

Werkha

Movement as Meaning, Rhythm as Recovery

More than a chronicle, Unsung Irregular is a celebration of motion, how a body finds its line, even when that line curves. The record blends electronica, jazz, breaks, and acoustic textures with a dancer’s sensitivity, translating discomfort into cadence and apprehension into groove. Each motif feels intentional yet alive, as if the tracks inhale and exhale with the listener. The healing here is not triumphalist; it’s iterative; a step taken, a pattern repeated, a place revisited until it becomes hospitable again.

“This album is about giving a voice to those fighting quiet battles daily… I hope that through my music I’ve created a space for people to feel like they can talk about their own irregularities.”

Werkha

That invitation, to speak, to move, to be heard, turns the listening experience into a shared space where irregularities are not corrected, they are honoured.

Unsung Irregular reminds us that music does not just express a life, it can reshape it. Werkha maps the arc of scoliosis onto rhythm and texture, creating an album that refuses to hide what hurts and refuses to let hurt be the final word. In its field recordings, its architectural nods, its disguised screams and careful collaborations, the record finds a language for bodies that carry pain quietly. And in its movement, it offers something gentler and stronger than closure, a way forward, step by step, beat by beat, where every curve is a line of meaning.

.Cent asked some questions exclusively to Werkha, and here are his responses:-

What’s your process for layering sounds and textures? How do you decide which instruments or samples best complement each other from track to track?

I actually sample a lot of my own recordings from previous releases, ideas and projects. It’s partly because it gives me this sense of ownership through the music, but also because I just know where these textures sit within my own music. Several of the album tracks have this bedrock of brass, which is re-sampled from brass elements of my previous album, and then blended with strings. I like combining textures of recorded instruments and synths; it gives the final sound a more acoustic depth – something that’s most apparent in my percussion.

There’s this constant throwback and referencing to my earlier work that represents a kind of artistic progression – layers of different lived experiences and maturity. I try to build on previous knowledge, adding a fresh perspective or texture that makes sense in the overall context of my growth as an artist.

When choosing collaborators, was it important to find people who have been through similar struggles?

Not at all – the most important thing for me is working with people who I trust to help me tell the incredibly personal story behind the record. It’s also about working with people who are receptive to the creative approach I have when making music – people who are open to receiving ideas about what is ultimately a concept record, and could interpret it with integrity. Everyone has their own story and problems that they deal with, and these experiences often help shape our creative output – but they’re usually things I learn while getting to know them through the process of making the music, and never a reason to begin that process in the first place.

Which songs or artists inspired you most while creating this album? Were there any that supported you emotionally in the same way you hope this project will support others?

It’s hard to pinpoint specific inspiration as it comes from such a broad number of places, but artists I was definitely listening to a lot of during this period were Nala Sinephro and, though he might not seem that associated sonically, Leon Vynehall. One of the records that I really enjoy and kept coming back to was Illum Sphere’s “Ghosts of Then and Now” a stunning album; it’s a bit of a comfort blanket record. There are definitely songs and records from all these artists that I found inspiration from; I prefer listening to full albums and letting them run – hopefully that’s how people enjoy my album too. In terms of support, that mainly comes from the artists I’ve collaborated with – they’re all friends who have supported me, and I trusted them to handle the album’s topic and sentiment. They’re people who have propped me up.

Do certain instruments represent different stages of your healing or diagnostic journey? For example, the violin textures on Narrow In and Humour This stood out to me. Were those sounds selected to express something about those moments in your story?

Yeah definitely – there is an emotional resonance to certain sounds, and we’re conditioned by the association of sounds with feelings, so it’s always something you reach for when trying to set a scene. The warm strings on Narrow In, for example, evoke a specific feeling that I set out to capture with a string player whom I really trust. We recorded different layers, using three different violas, then three different Violins, layering them to convey the right emotion. Humour This begins with a really haunting melody that started off on the keyboard, but we flipped it to violin and it had this real Balkan or folk feeling which I struggled to contextualise, until we doubled it up and added an appropriate reverb, then it started to feel more like a sample, which made sense when it sat with the rest of the track.

I’m always fascinated by the way different instruments can convey different emotions. Again, Humour. This has a strong contrast between the sincerity and cynicism of the message behind the track, but there’s a call and response between the guitar and the bass, which gives it a playful or even comedic undertone. I love trying to understand how we decipher these sounds and ensuring the music conveys the right message.

There are moments of irregularity and variation throughout the music. Was that intentional to mirror the unpredictability of your experience with scoliosis?

100%. I did a radio interview recently and referred to Irregular You as my ugly duckling. It’s intentionally a really challenging track to listen to, but it’s the track which conveys all those feelings of frustration and discomfort that I have experienced with scoliosis – feelings that I carried through the track’s production too. I wanted it to sound like the way it feels when you try to dance with an injury, it’s probably one of the mores bizarre tracks to listen to in isolation, but in the context of the full record I hope that it makes sense.

How do you define “healing” in the context of this project? Is it about physical recovery, emotional acceptance, or creative expression?

Good question, the answer probably sits somewhere in between all three of those. In a physical sense, the healing is about regaining my mobility and a sense of control. I’ll never be able to be completely ‘healed’, so a large part of that healing comes from an ability to understand the condition and – like you say – accept it. Creating this record is a way of me ‘accepting’ it, by putting the condition in front of myself. I’ve already seen the impact of this very public ‘acceptance’ – I’ve never experienced such silence from a crowd whilst explaining some of the meaning behind the songs at the album launch party; it was powerful, and really emphasised the contrasting feelings that the record conveys.

What do you believe is the key to learning to accept one’s hidden disability?

Not being isolated with it. A big part of the intention behind this record was to connect with other people who have scoliosis, and while I’ve started to make those connections through a collaboration with the Scoliosis Support & Research charity, I’m still waiting to hear more of those voices; something I hope will come in time as the album resonates with people. I have found that sharing your experiences with others who are in a similar position is really liberating; it gives you a baseline to build on, a comfortable starting point.

Was this album created throughout your healing process or at a point of recovery and acceptance?

The album started with Sastrugi, a track that was inspired by the shapes that the wind made in the snow on one of the first major walks I did after a period of severe immobility. It was a point where my understanding of the condition began, and that understanding reflects a form of healing. It was a defining moment for sure, but it’s also a healing journey that never really ends.

Find all you wish to know about Werkha here at werkha.com

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