About this item

Having released three albums in Welsh and Cornish, 'Utopia' is Gwenno Saunders’ first album recorded predominantly in English, and presents a very different side to her life and songwriting.

Forty-three years into her life, 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. 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.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The brilliant Gwenno returns for her latest LP, this time sees the multilinguist rendering her experiences in Vegas in English, and with it moving more towards her wistful 50's influenced indie sound we've not heard so much in the past few albums. Regardless of the language in which she writes, Gwenno's music is always endlessly evocative and beautifully conceived. It's stunning, a perfect development of her sound.

TRACK LISTING

1 London 1757
2 Dancing On Volcanoes
3 Utopia
4 Y Gath
5 War
6 73
7 The Devil
8 Ghost Of You
9 St Ives New School
10 Hireth