Compact Disco

Lotfi, Pál, and Walkó first met in 2005 when Lotfi Behnam’s techno producer duo, Collins and Behnam, planned to cover Adamski and Seal’s song titled “Killer” and were looking for a singer. They saw Walkó Csaba singing on television and invited him to sing the cover. At that time, Walkó was singing in a funk-pop band called Brownfield and asked some of his musician friends to accompany him to the recording. One of them was Pál Gábor, who was also a founder of a nu-jazz band called Toy Division. 

In the summer of 2008, Lotfi proposed the idea of a vocal electronic pop music ensemble to Walkó, who then asked his keyboardist, Pál, to join them. 

By March 2009, they were writing and arranging songs. By the time their first album was ready, the band members agreed that the band’s name would be Compact Disco and the album title would be “Stereoid”. They signed a contract with CLS Music in September 2009, and the album was released in December.

The band started performing live from January 2010. They shot their first music video for their song “I’m in Love”, which soon gained notable popularity, ranking in the top ten on many Hungarian hit lists. 

The band decided to produce another video clip, an “image clip” that would introduce the band in May 2010 for the song “Without You”.

For the festival concerts in the summer of 2010, Pál and Walkó invited bassist Attila Sándor, to join them. He officially became a member of the band in November. In the same month the band shot their third music video for the song “Fly or Dive”. The song topped the Hungarian dance hit list, the VIVA Club Chart. 

On November 15, 2010 the band won the MTV brand:new election. They got assistance from their viral video series “Help Antos!”, starring actor Gémes Antos, which caught the attention of the advertising industry. 

A second album, “II” was released on May 14, 2011. The first single from the album was “Feel the Rain”, which reached 2nd place on the MR2 Petőfi Radio Top 30 list. 

The band won the Fonogram award in the “Domestic Electronic Music Production of the Year” category on March 2, 2011. On April 24, Compact Disco won the 2011 Antropos.hu Award in the “Best Album of 2010” category.

The British record label Age Media signed a contract to release the first three singles from “Stereoid” worldwide, just as Universal Music Group did for Romania and Bulgaria during 2011.

In the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest’s Hungarian national final called “A Dal”, they won with their song “Sound of Our Hearts”. Therefore, they represented Hungary in the Eurovision Song Contest, where they reached the final and earned a 24th place there. In the same year, their third album “Two Point Five” was released. However, the singles following were from “II”: “Leave It Up To Me” and “Fly With You” both became hits.

In 2013, Compact Disco released yet another album: “The Storm”. The songs “We Will Not Go Down” and “The Storm” also entered the charts. The song “Mrs. Right” did not hit the charts. A new single in Hungarian, “Csak a szó”, was released in May 2015. Also their fourth album, “Csak a szó”, came out.

In September 2016, the band performed in Portugal. In May 2017 a new single, “Veled” was released, including a video. The song became a hit for the band. In December, the song “Lazul A Város” was released. Behnam Lotfi left the band after this, so Gábor and Csaba went on as a duo.

On March 3, 2018, they released their album titled “4”, which consists entirely of songs in Hungarian and includes their previously released singles. On October 26, 2018, they released their song titled “Közel” (Close), followed by “Világom” (My World) on October 1, 2019. This was followed in 2020 by “Maradj otthon” (Stay Home), and in 2021, they released the single “Minden rendben” (Everything’s Alright), which also features the band Hősök (Heroes). The song reached the #1 spot in the Hungarian charts.