Gwenno – Utopia
Gwenno announces her new album Utopia due out July 11 via Heavenly Recordings.
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 lead single “Dancing On Volcanoes” together with a stylish B&W video shot in Las Vegas.
Over a backing track that swirls, drives and punches like a motorik-fuelled version of The Smiths, Gwenno looks back on 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. It’s the perfect return of one of the UK’s most creative and driven musicians.
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!”
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 extraordinary exploration of all of these selves. 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 favorite 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 realized 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 honor 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.”
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