Gwenno has shared her new single ‘Y Gath’ alongside a smart video in which she’s seen exploring her feline side. An intricately drawn, Cymraeg paean to the nocturnal activities of the feline with vivid vocals, an arty daubing keys, and a percussive strut as they climb the grimy city walls that surround them, ‘Y Gath’ (the press release) says it “sounds like spectral feline poetry being delivered at a midnight pagan gathering”. It’s lifted from her new album Utopia due out 11th July via Heavenly Recordings. Watch the video here:
Commenting on the track Gwenno says: “Y Gath means The Cat. I just don’t know how I feel about cats, you know? But I also think it’s because I am a cat in many ways. I see myself in these creatures and I’m part envious, part disgusted by them. So it’s a song about cats and birds nodding at you, and the style of the song evolved quite naturally into something very familiar and Welsh. And then when I asked Huw (H Hawkline) and Cate (Le Bon) to be on it, it just made complete sense. We all knew what it needed to be, because we’ve all grown up on S4C and 70s psychedelic rock music, and Welsh language music. So we didn’t need to have a big conversation, we just know what this is about.”
In other news, Gwenno has added more live dates to her Autumn UK Tour including shows in Birmingham and Brighton. All dates are listed below.
Gwenno UK live dates:
Thursday 19th June – Cornwall – The Lost Gardens
Thursday 26th June – Glastonbury Festival, The Tree Stage (piano set)
Wednesday 2nd July – Cardiff – Blackweir Park (with Alanis Morisette)
Saturday 16th August – Crickhowell – Green Man Festival
Saturday 12th July – Leeds – Jumbo Leeds
Sunday 13th July – Liverpool – Rough Trade
Monday 14th July – Bristol – Rough Trade
Tuesday 15th July – Cardiff – Spillers
Wednesday 16th July – London – Rough Trade Denmark street
Thursday 17th July – Brighton – Resident Brighton
Wednesday 29th October – Exeter – Phoenix
Thursday 30th October – Southampton – Papillion
Friday 31st October London – EartH
Saturday 1st November – Manchester – The White Hotel
Monday 3rd November – Leeds – Belgrave Music Hall
Tuesday 4th November – Glasgow – Nice n Sleazy
Friday 7th November – Bethesda – Neuadd Ogwen
Saturday 8th November – Blackpool – Bootleg Social
Sunday 9th November – Birmingham – The Castle & Falcon
Tuesday 11th November – Cardiff – New Theatre
Friday 14 November – Brighton – St Luke’s
Saturday 15th November – Falmouth – Princess Pavilion
43 years into her life, Gwenno Saunders has been many people. The disaffected Cardiff schoolgirl; the teenage Las Vegas dancer; the singer in indie pop group The Pipettes. There was a turn in a Bollywood film, a nightclub tour, a stint cleaning floors in an East London pub, long before she would become an acclaimed solo songwriter in both Welsh and Cornish. A winner of the Welsh Music Prize, a nominee for the Mercury Award, a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh. There were also the days of Nevada, London, Brighton, of Irish dancing, techno clubs, messiness and chaos.
Utopia, Saunders’ fourth solo album, is an extraordinary exploration of all of these selves. If the singer regards her first three solo records — 2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov and 2022’s Tresor as “childhood records”, rooted in her upbringing, her parents, her formative identity, then Utopia captures a time of self-determination and experimentation. These are songs of discovery, of the years between being someone’s daughter and becoming someone’s wife and someone’s mother. They range from floor-fillers to piano ballads, via contributions from Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline, and encompass William Blake, a favourite Edrica Huws poem, and the Number 73 bus.
There is a sense of revelation to Utopia, a feeling markedly different to that of previous records. Having released three albums in Welsh and Cornish, Utopia is Gwenno’s first album recorded predominantly in English, and presents a very different side to her life and songwriting.
“I feel as if I’ve written a debut record, because it’s a different language and it’s a different part of my life,” she says. “It’s about that point where I go out into the world on my own, which people generally write about first, and then get on with their lives. But it’s taken me so long to digest it — I needed 20 years just to make sense of things, and I realised the starting point of my creative life isn’t Wales, it’s actually North America.”
Photo credit: Claire Marie Bailey
