Happy St David’s day! What better way to celebrate than to revel in some of the finest new sounds Wales has to offer right now?!
Adwaith – ETO
West Walian trio Adwaith returned last week with news of their eagerly anticipated second album Bato Mato out 1st July via Libertino, following hotly in the footsteps of their Welsh Music Prize winning 2019 debut Melyn.
The lead single ‘ETO‘ is perhaps Adwaith at their most anthemic yet! With a widescreen sound it positively bursts through the speakers! Throbbing and introspective verses give way to a glorious, anthemic chorus swelling with a big-hearted infatuation and infused by the band’s memories of speeding through Russia on a life-changing trip to perform at UU. Sound in Ulan-Ude, Siberia. This is a sound set to capture hearts in the next few months, from one of Wales’s finest bands at this moment!
“We really wanted to write a heartfelt song about being infatuated with someone.” explain the band, “This isn’t something we normally write about and we wanted to approach this song differently to our other ones. We felt inspired to write a big pop song.”
“It was a life-changing trip that really inspired us to write this album,” explains bassist Gwenllian Anthony. “The barren landscape and brutalist architecture really seeped into these songs and the use of world instruments was heavily inspired by this journey”. “Our journey through the Siberian and Mongolian wilderness influenced the writing and sound of the album to be as open and big as the limitless sky around us there,” says Hollie Singer.
“Our first album was very much about growing up in west Wales and going from teenagers to adults,” says Anthony. “This is the next step in our journey: shit, this is life. We hit reality.”
Dead Method – Femme!
Dead Method recently released his brand new single ‘Femme!’ and it’s a bop! He says the “song is a celebration of Dead Method’s feminine side, and all of the powerful LGBTQ+ people in his life, exploring the pros and cons of living authentically.”
Working with Edward Russell (Inside The Groove) who produced the track, the result is buoyant and striking pop music that shifts Dead Method in a more bombastic, anthemic and commercial direction. Ripe with filthy basslines, illuminating synths, strident beats and socially conscious lyrics rippling with a confident chant-along chorus that’s two parts Erasure one part early Lady Gaga. Strike a pose! It’s fantastic!
Murder Club – Sour Candy
Billing themselves as “The Quiet Grrrls of Riot Grrrls”, Murder Club are an all-girls synth, indie, pop band based in Newport, South Wales. Their ace new single ‘Sour Candy‘ is a catchy bittersweet slice of frayed around the edges indie pop, with a twist. Subtle percussive sweeps and chiming riffs, are spooned over this tantalising song with wistful harmonies that dismember sexism and mistreatment by men. With elements of c86 mingling with the more downtempo moments of The Sundays. It’s a tuneful plea for agency wrapped in a mighty fine earworm from this very promising all girl four-piece.
Benji Wild – Shame
Lifted from Benji Wild‘s brilliant debut album ‘Skull and Bones’, from last year, with soulful backdrops, Wild delivers an urgent and intense flow, about the dichotomy of living, encapsulating the struggle of every day life, injustice on the streets, the power of creativity versus the pressure to create more and more. Personal, knowing and witty, this is immense stuff.
Growing up in a low income, and, in his own words ‘an unconventional household’, in an area of Cardiff renowned for crime, it wasn’t the easiest of environments, but it was during these formative years that Benji threw himself into music and discovered that music was the only future he could see. ‘I’ve poured everything into this debut album. My upbringing, the good and the bad times, and hopefully people will connect. Feels a long time in the making, but I know the real journey is only just about to begin.’
BlueBelle – Ancestors
West Walian songwriter BlueBelle – born Maeve Bluebell Tonkin-Wells – will soon release her debut EP, High Priestess, consisting of four tracks that explore “the persecution and power of womanhood and take inspiration from mysticism and fairy tales, gospels and the divine power of woman.” The EP will be available on all platforms on Friday 4th March.
Maeve met legendary Grammy Award-winning producer Steve Levine, who has worked with the likes of Culture Club, The Beach Boys and The Clash, and the two collaborated to make the High Priestess EP.
“I am a whore and a holy woman” she sings stridently on ‘Ancestors’, representing the fact that women don’t have to be one or the other, and can be or do anything they please. It’s not just a catchy anthem it’s a reassertion of the power and history of womanhood. With shades of Kylie and latter Madonna, this pulsing elegant disco-pop anthem caressed by spiralling strings and Maeve’s dexterous vocal, is an impressive first taste of the High Priestess EP. Which she calls “a love letter to women and sisterhood in general, with even the videos of the tracks being worked on by BlueBelle’s own sisters.”
“The EP is a sweeping journey through time immemorial, and is inspired by female figures, both fabled and factual. More than anything, it explores the voices of forgotten women, whose stories needed to be told.”
Aderyn – Yearning
On Aderyn‘s ‘Yearning’ she opens up on the crippling pain of pining for someone, in her best and most personal track yet. With a dynamic that shifts from single guitar strum and vocal into a full-blown bittersweet anthem. Aderyn’s confessional, pretty yet darkly brutal couplets cut to the quick “feels like I’m dying and I’m not going to live again/Your pretty and it hurts right now” she sings as nifty licks, bounding drums and strings swoop in. Bursting with vivid imagery ‘Yearning‘ is effortlessly catchy, raw and another step forward for this most exciting emerging artist.
“I wrote this song on the floor of my childhood bedroom in lockdown. It is a song that encapsulates the feeling of pining for someone. That exquisite, aching pain. It was the first time I’d felt that way about a girl, and this is without a doubt the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in a song. All those feelings were so new, so raw” – Aderyn
Recorded in her parent’s house in her childhood room, Aderyn wanted to maintain and capture the vulnerability in the final recording.
“We didn’t record to a metronome, and added wailing guitars, sweeping bowed double bass and an echoey floor tom that I wanted to sound like a heartbeat. There’s a lot of peaks and troughs dynamically and with the tempo of this song. I wanted everything musically to be dictated by emotion, not convention”
“When I wrote it, I had only come out to my family as bi a few months before, and it wasn’t an easy journey. There were all these thorny emotions tangled together, and at the center, this girl”
Aderyn will play Wales Goes Pop in April (15th-17th)
Ailsa Tully – Salt Glaze
Ailsa Tully is back with the beautifully understated ’Salt Glaze’ she’s also announced her debut UK headline tour.
‘Salt Glaze’ is a meditative song that tenderly recalls their time spent living in her Grandma’s old house during last January’s lockdown. The house had remained unchanged since her Grandma’s passing and the salt glaze ceramics located all around the family home absorbed into Ailsa’s creativity. Sonorous and haunting, Ailsa’s piercing vocal punctures hearts above cello-playing, dexterous bass and intricate guitars. The accompanying video is also wonderfully touching. Shot on home-made video, it lovingly captures the time spent in that home and Ailsa and her partner’s attempts to try and make it into a space of their own.
Don Leisure – Egg Yolk Bun
Don Leisure returns with a brand new 25-track album Shaboo Strikes Back. If the teasers are anything to go by, it’s going to offer a treasure trove of sound the lead track ‘Egg Yolk Bun‘ is a groove-laden trawl through the mists of the 70s funk and Indian found samples. The sound of searching through your radio dial, it’s a refreshing bricolage of sound and quite tremendous.
Five years have passed since the first Shaboo album was released. A collection of beats and pieces that documented the road trip of Don’s youth – hip hop music interspersed with Asian radio station jingles of old, dedicated to Bollywood actor, Nasser ‘Shaboo’ Bharwani – Don Leisure’s late uncle.
Shaboo Strikes Back is a much-awaited sequel to the 2017 album. This time round he’s invited a few special guests to join him on his travels – most notably Welsh legend Gruff Rhys provides the vocals on ‘Neon Drizzle (Hotel Shaboo)’, whilst acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and Jazzman-signed harpist Amanda Whiting lend their talents to ‘All Praises Due‘. There is even a special cameo appearance from his young daughter, (aka Shaboo’s great-niece!), Naima, on ‘Naima’s Dream‘.
Woodooman – Y Nos Mewn Cariad
‘Y Nos Mewn Cariad’ is the new single by Woodooman, Cardiff resident and Multi-Instrumentalist and Artist, Iwan Ap Huw Morgan. Eerie, intense and sinister this is the sound of darkness, nature at night and contemplation. The tension of trembling instrumentation rises and falls as Morgan’s unique baritone encapsulates the from ‘fire to ice’ landscape. The best part comes with the swelling pianos and a strum as he urges us to allow the thoughts flood in. Haunting and epic.
“The song draws on the artist’s love of solitude.. It is a celebration of the beauty of the night and its mystery as he urges us to free our minds and open our hearts to the unknown.”
