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Apr 07, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Clare Marie Bailey

Welsh musician Gwenno (full name Gwenno Saunders) has announced a new album, Utopia, which is her first solo LP sung mainly in the English language, and shared its first single, “Dancing On Volcanoes,” via a music video. Utopia is due out July 11 via Heavenly. Below, check out the new single and album details.

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.

Utopia Tracklist:

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

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