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
Images 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 in regards to the tune in a press launch: “Y Gath means The Cat. I simply don’t understand how I really feel about cats, you recognize? 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 tune about cats and birds nodding at you, and the type of the tune developed fairly naturally into one thing very acquainted and Welsh. After which once 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 a giant 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 one in every of our Songs of the Week. Then she shared its second single, “Warfare,” through a music video. It was additionally one in every 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 young person within the lead function in Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. She lived in an house advanced with 40 fellow teenage performers, the place there was a pool and a fitness center, however little else to do past “drink, medicine, consuming issues,” a press launch explains.
“Then each Saturday we’d go to this techno membership referred to as Utopia and simply get fully spangled till Monday, after we had to return to work,” Saunders remembers, declaring that the membership impressed the brand new album’s title.
“Within the authentic Greek, ‘utopia’ doesn’t imply the perfect place, it means ‘non-place,’” Saunders explains. “And that’s the purpose of the report as effectively.”
After her stint in Vegas, Saunders moved again to the UK, however to not Wales, as a substitute settling in London. “I didn’t know anybody or something, I might simply trouble folks and reply adverts in The Stage journal, and go to essentially foolish auditions,” she says. “I used to be in search of folks to hang around with and make tunes.”
Finally 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 lately). Saunders felt like her earlier albums dealt extra together 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 report, as a result of it’s a unique language and it’s a unique a part of my life,” she says. “It’s about that time the place I am going out into the world by myself, which individuals typically write about first, after which get on with their lives. However it’s taken me so lengthy to digest it—I wanted 20 years simply to make sense of issues, and I spotted the place to begin of my inventive life isn’t Wales, it’s truly North America.”
Saunders provides: “I believe the way in which I’ve managed to jot down in English is by acknowledging that I can’t translate a variety of recollections. I’ve discovered that concept actually necessary to discover. I believe if I’d simply stayed in Wales, and I hadn’t lived anyplace else or skilled some other tradition then it will be actually completely different. I might’ve made information in Welsh, however I left dwelling at 16.”
Saunders’ long run collaborator Rhys Edwards as soon as once more produced the album, which was recorded dwell together 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 part’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.