May 07, 2025 Photography by Clare Marie Bailey
Welsh musician Gwenno (full name Gwenno Saunders) is releasing a new album, Utopia, on July 11 via Heavenly. Now she has shared its second single, “War,” via a music video. The song is inspired by a World War II-era poem by Welsh artist and poet Edrica Huws entitled “Vingt-Et-Un.” Watch the video below.
Saunders had this to say about the song in a press release: “I’ve loved this Edrica Huws poem for a really long time. She was an artist and poet, and she wrote this at the start of the Second World War. It kept resonating with me over this period where we’ve really normalized the idea of war, and actually at times have perhaps been quite enthusiastic from our sofas. I think her poem is really worth something in an age where we’re obviously tumbling towards something catastrophic. Those words have really reminded me of that very small window you have before it happens—the chance to be considerate, and more vigilant, and aware. It’s the elegance of her writing, the calmness of her writing, the wisdom.”
Utopia is her first solo LP sung mainly in the English language. Previously Gwenno shared the album’s first single, “Dancing On Volcanoes,” via a music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week.
The video for “Dancing On Volcanoes” was filmed in Las Vegas, where Saunders spent two years as a teenager in the lead role in Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. She lived in an apartment complex with 40 fellow teenage performers, where there was a pool and a gym, but little else to do beyond “drink, drugs, eating disorders,” a press release explains.
“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,” Saunders remembers, pointing out that the club inspired the new album’s title.
“In the original Greek, ‘utopia’ doesn’t mean the ideal place, it means ‘non-place,’” Saunders explains. “And that’s the point of the record as well.”
After her stint in Vegas, Saunders moved back to the UK, but not to Wales, instead settling in 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.”
Eventually she ended up in the Brighton-based girl-group The Pipettes, alongside Rose Elinor Dougall, releasing two albums with them. Post-Pipettes, Saunders has released three acclaimed solo albums—2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov, and 2022’s Mercury Prize-nominated Tresor—all sung mainly in either Welsh or Cornish (an almost lost language that’s had a bit of a revival in recent years). Saunders felt like her previous albums dealt more with her childhood, whereas Utopia tackles a period of her life where she spoke mainly English and so she felt more natural singing in that language this time around.
“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 adds: “I think the way I’ve managed to write in English is by acknowledging that I can’t translate a lot of memories. I’ve found that idea really important to explore. I think if I’d just stayed in Wales, and I hadn’t lived anywhere else or experienced any other culture then it would be really different. I would’ve made records in Welsh, but I left home at 16.”
Saunders’ long term collaborator Rhys Edwards once again produced the album, which was recorded live with her band in her living room. The album also features fellow Welsh musicians Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline.
Summing up the experience of writing and recording the album and revisiting her past with it, Saunders says: “I feel compelled as a songwriter to keep digging it all up. Everything’s a diary entry for me. And in writing about all of this I’ve remembered the chaos of myself.”
Read our interview with Gwenno on Y Dydd Olaf.
Read our interview with Gwenno on Le Kov.
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Feb 28, 2025 Issue #74 – The Protest Issue with Kathleen Hanna and Bartees Strange
