Gwenno today announces her new album “Utopia” due out on July 11, 2025 via Heavenly Recordings and available to pre-order as a physical and digital release. The album is the follow-up to her hugely acclaimed third album Tresor which was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2022.
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. 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.
It is an album that spans 25 years. “All of adulthood,” she points out. “You get to this point and you go ‘God, that quarter of a century went fast.’ But I want to acknowledge it, and respect it and say, for better or worse, all of that happened.”
Pre-Order Physical here: https://gwenno.tmstor.es/
Pre-Order Digital here: https://ffm.to/gwenno-utopia
To accompany the album 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 country’s most creative and driven musicians.
Watch the offiical music video for “Dancing On Volcanoes” through the YouTube player below:
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!“
