Today (March 8), the anticipated new full-length album from Speed Walton is officially available. It’s a “debut album” of sorts — the long-in-the-works Real Name Speed, as the title indicates, is the first album to be released under Walton’s real name.
A Cincinnati native, Walton was a prominent force on the local music scene for several years under the name Buggs Tha Rocka, first
emerging as frontperson of the band Gold Shoes, then breaking off for a solo career that included various mixtapes and his actual debut solo album , 2014’s Scattered Thoughts of an American Poet. Walton is also one-half of Space Invadaz, his duo project with Donte Fleming (of Cincinnati legends MOOD).
Walton — who dominated at the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards for a stretch of several years, scoring more than a dozen nominations in a variety of categories and winning the Hip Hop trophy every year between 2012-2016 — changed his stage-name a couple of years ago, then pulled a Lebron James and relocated from Ohio to Los Angeles to further pursue his career in the music industry.
The new album takes Walton’s imaginative vision to the next level in terms of quality, while retaining his characteristic alternative edge, which tightropes between hearty Funk and twinkling Soul on a wire of trippy diversity and progressiveness that borders on psychedelia. Walton has released a handful of singles from the project in the lead-up to today’s release, most recently dropping the music video for Real Name Speed track “Fall Thru.”
Real Name Speed is available on most major digital platforms today, including Amazon, Apple Music/iTunes and Spotify.
Walton is back in Cincinnati tonight for an album release celebration at Top Cats in Corryville. Showtime is 9 p.m.
Follow Speed Walton on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
This article appears in Mar 6-13, 2019.
