Gwenno Shares Video for New Tune “Y Gath” (Feat. Cate Le Bon and H Hawkline)
Utopia Due Out July 11 through Heavenly
Jun 05, 2025
Pictures by Clare Marie Bailey
Welsh musician Gwenno (full identify Gwenno Saunders) is releasing a brand new album, Utopia, on July 11 through Heavenly. Now she has shared the album’s third single, “Y Gath,” which options backing vocals from fellow Welsh artists Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline. Watch the video beneath.
Saunders had this to say concerning the music in a press launch: “Y Gath means The Cat. I simply don’t know the way I really feel about cats, you understand? However I additionally suppose it’s as a result of I’m a cat in some ways. I see myself in these creatures and I’m half envious, half disgusted by them. So it’s a music about cats and birds nodding at you, and the model of the music developed fairly naturally into one thing very acquainted and Welsh. After which after I requested Huw (H Hawkline) and Cate (Le Bon) to be on it, it simply made full sense. All of us knew what it wanted to be, as a result of we’ve all grown up on S4C and ’70s psychedelic rock music, and Welsh language music. So we didn’t must have an enormous dialog, we simply know what that is about.”
Utopia is her first solo LP sung primarily within the English language, though “Y Gath” is in Welsh. Beforehand Gwenno shared the album’s first single, “Dancing On Volcanoes,” through a music video. It was certainly one of our Songs of the Week. Then she shared its second single, “Battle,” through a music video. It was additionally certainly one of our Songs of the Week.
The video for “Dancing On Volcanoes” was filmed in Las Vegas, the place Saunders spent two years as a teen within the lead function in Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. She lived in an condo advanced with 40 fellow teenage performers, the place there was a pool and a health club, however little else to do past “drink, medicine, consuming problems,” a press launch explains.
“Then each Saturday we’d go to this techno membership known as Utopia and simply get utterly spangled till Monday, once we had to return to work,” Saunders remembers, declaring that the membership impressed the brand new album’s title.
“Within the unique Greek, ‘utopia’ doesn’t imply the perfect place, it means ‘non-place,’” Saunders explains. “And that’s the purpose of the document as properly.”
After her stint in Vegas, Saunders moved again to the UK, however to not Wales, as an alternative settling in London. “I didn’t know anybody or something, I might simply trouble individuals and reply adverts in The Stage journal, and go to actually foolish auditions,” she says. “I used to be searching for individuals to hang around with and make tunes.”
Ultimately she ended up within the Brighton-based girl-group The Pipettes, alongside Rose Elinor Dougall, releasing two albums with them. Put up-Pipettes, Saunders has launched three acclaimed solo albums—2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov, and 2022’s Mercury Prize-nominated Tresor—all sung primarily in both Welsh or Cornish (an nearly misplaced language that’s had a little bit of a revival in recent times). Saunders felt like her earlier albums dealt extra along with her childhood, whereas Utopia tackles a interval of her life the place she spoke primarily English and so she felt extra pure singing in that language this time round.
“I really feel as if I’ve written a debut document, as a result of it’s a special language and it’s a special a part of my life,” she says. “It’s about that time the place I’m going out into the world by myself, which individuals usually write about first, after which get on with their lives. But it surely’s taken me so lengthy to digest it—I wanted 20 years simply to make sense of issues, and I spotted the start line of my inventive life isn’t Wales, it’s really North America.”
Saunders provides: “I feel the way in which I’ve managed to jot down in English is by acknowledging that I can’t translate loads of reminiscences. I’ve discovered that concept actually vital to discover. I feel if I’d simply stayed in Wales, and I hadn’t lived wherever else or skilled another tradition then it will be actually completely different. I might’ve made data in Welsh, however I left residence at 16.”
Saunders’ long run collaborator Rhys Edwards as soon as once more produced the album, which was recorded stay along with her band in her lounge. The album additionally options fellow Welsh musicians Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline.
Summing up the expertise of writing and recording the album and revisiting her previous with it, Saunders says: “I really feel compelled as a songwriter to maintain digging all of it up. Every little thing’s a diary entry for me. And in writing about all of this I’ve remembered the chaos of myself.”
Learn our interview with Gwenno on Y Dydd Olaf.
Learn our interview with Gwenno on Le Kov.
