Gwenno – Y Gath

With her new album Utopia due out July 11 via Heavenly Recordings, and following the singles “Dancing On Volcanoes” and “War”, Welsh superstar and former Mercury nominee Gwenno shares her new single “Y Gath” alongside a stylish video in which she’s seen exploring her feline side.

A hazy and glorious Cymraeg paean to the cat and the grimy city walls that surround them, “Y Gath” sounds like spectral feline poetry being delivered at a midnight pagan gathering.

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.”

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.

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