Gwenno has announced details of her new album Utopia due out 11th July via Heavenly Recordings and available to pre-order here. The album is the follow-up to her hugely acclaimed third album Tresor which was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2022. To accompany the announcement Gwenno has shared the beguiling lead single ‘Dancing On Volcanoes‘ together with a stylish B&W video shot in Las Vegas. Over a backing track that swirls and punches, decorated with gleaming licks and a two step beat, like a motorik-fuelled version of The Smiths, Gwenno tip toes across dancefloors that no longer exist, to the act of dancing as catharsis and the magic of losing oneself until 5am in a strange and beautiful new environment. Watch the video below:
Commenting on the track Gwenno says: “Jarvis Cocker dancing alone on stage, surrounded by dry ice, perfectly conveying the loss of our congregational dancing and drinking in small venues with a slight swing of the hip and flick of a hand… dancing ’til 5am at Le Mandela restaurant in Grangetown, Cardiff… the Pet Shop Boys’ perfectly aimed observations on modern life… the spirit of Johnny Marr on guitar, his echoes of the Celtic sea passed down through the generations… the need to dance as a cathartic act… it’s all here – Dancing on Volcanoes!”
Additionally, Gwenno has announced news of Summer live appearances as well as a headline show at EartH in London in October. All dates are listed below with more to be announced soon.
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, a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh, there were the days of Nevada, London, Brighton; of Irish dancing, techno clubs, messiness and chaos.
Utopia, Saunders’ fourth solo album, is an 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. It is her finest work to date.
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.”
Saunders was a teenager when she left school to take the lead role in Michael Flatley’s ‘Lord of the Dance’ show in Las Vegas. For two years, she lived in an apartment complex with her fellow performers. They were seven miles from the strip, 40 teenagers with nothing much to do. There was a pool and a gym; drink, drugs, eating disorders. “Then every Saturday we’d go to this techno club called Utopia and just get completely spangled until Monday, when we had to go back to work,” she says.
She named the record Utopia in part to honour the wonder of those nights and that time, but also to nod to the fact that each of the album’s 10 songs belongs to its own place and time. “In the original Greek, ‘utopia’ doesn’t mean the ideal place, it means ‘non-place’,” she says. “And that’s the point of the record as well.”
When she returned from Vegas to the UK, via a stretch in Europe, Saunders moved to London. “I didn’t know anyone or anything, I would just hassle people and answer adverts in The Stage magazine, and go to really silly auditions,” she says. “I was looking for people to hang out with and make tunes.”
She thinks now of that time — of Irish dancing in a Bollywood movie, and attempting to make club hits melding techno and Celtic music, as a distinct part of the early Noughties’ aesthetic. It was the days of musical mash-ups and the clumsiness of the early digital age. It was butterfly tops worn with sparkly low-slung jeans. “It was really disparate things being stuck together in the tackiest way possible,” she says.
This was a period of long nights out in the subterranean bars of Dalston, cigarettes and bottles of Efes, dancing, DIY gigs, the sense of the city sprawled out before you. In the thick of this time, Saunders joined the Brighton-based band The Pipettes, recording two acclaimed albums and acquiring a reputation for their spirited live sets, complete with coordinated costumes and all-male backing band.
After The Pipettes fell apart Saunders took a job behind the bar at the Haggerston in Hackney and wondered what to do next. “There was so much nihilism around, suddenly, and it felt like no one really gave a shit about anyone,” she says. She decided to head back to Cardiff. “By 2011 I was quite traumatised from that whole experience,” she says. “I think so much about going back to Wales was finding the root of something again, and not retreating as much as healing, and reviving, and digging the earth, and turning it over. I just creatively needed to go back to the start.”
Utopia began quite differently to its predecessors. First came the realisation that in order to capture this specific time in her life she would need to use English. “I think the way I’ve managed to write in English is by acknowledging that I can’t translate a lot of memories,” she says. “I’ve found that idea really important to explore. I think if I’d just stayed in Wales, and I hadn’t lived anywhere else or experienced any other culture then it would be really different. I would’ve made records in Welsh, but I left home at 16.”
Up until this point, Saunders’ songs had also always started electronically. On Utopia, she began each song on piano — the one exception is album closer, ‘Hireth’, written on harp. In part, she saw her return to piano — an instrument she has played since childhood, as a reflection of her shifting relationship with sound. But it was also a way to develop her songwriting, to explore the idea that songs that “perhaps can’t be made by a machine, that can only be made by human experience, have a far more potent value.” She took a similar approach to recording — the album set down in her living room, live, with her band, and produced once again by her long term collaborator, Rhys Edwards.
To look back over this period of her life has been a strange sensation for Saunders. “I feel compelled as a songwriter to keep digging it all up,” she says. “Everything’s a diary entry for me. And in writing about all of this I’ve remembered the chaos of myself.”
Gwenno UK live dates:
Saturday 26 April – London – The Social
Sunday 4 May – Salford – Sounds From The Other City
Thursday 19 June – Cornwall – The Lost Gardens
Wednesday 2 July – Cardiff – Blackweir Park (with Alanis Morisette)
Saturday 16 August – Crickhowell – Green Man Festival
Friday 31 October – London – EartH
Tuesday 11 November – Cardiff – New Theatre
Photo credit: Clare Marie Bailey
