Description

Gruff Rhys announces his new album, Sadness Sets Me Free, released by Rough Trade Records. Incredibly. this will be the 25th album he has released in his 35year career individually, collaboratively and as a member of various bands. Sadness Sets Me Free is also the follow up to 2021s Seeking New Gods, his first solo top ten record.Leadoff single Celestial Candyfloss is a telling four minute glimpse of the album, revealing the heady wonders and classic pop sounds within. Soaring strings carry the sweet melodies along, anchored by just enough necessary melancholy to add emotional ballast. The eyepopping video was created by longtime collaborator Mark James and compliments the scope and style of the song on a galactic scale.Celestial Candyfloss is, Gruff says, an attempted pocket symphony about the cosmic lengths that people will travel in the pursuit of love and acceptance. Mark James has brought the Sadness Sets Me Free album cover to life and managed to place me watching TV interference in a shipping container thats lost in space. For what is apparently the 25th album Ive had a hand in writing Ive reverted to a rich seam of inspiration relating to shedding some light on sadness and the general terror of cosmic loneliness.And so it was that Gruff and his band Osian Gwynedd piano, Huw V Williams double bass and former Flaming Lips drummer turned Super Furry Animalsarchivist Kliph Scurlock drums piled into a van driven by the late, legendary tour manager Dr Kiko Loiacono, and raced from Dunkirk, where they had just played the final show of a tour of Spain and France, to the outskirts of Paris in the early hours of a March morning in 2022. There, in La Frette Studios, a recording facility installed in a 19thcentury house, Gruff and his roadhardened group tracked Sadness Sets Me Free in just three days. Backing vocals were added along the way by Kate Stables from This Is The Kit, along with additional strings and orchestration and it was mixed between Marseille and Cardiff. What finally emerged from these intense bouts of crosscontinental activity was Gruffs most accomplished and beautiful record to date.In a career that has taken him from the slatemining towns of north west Wales, down to the expat communities of Patagonia, up to the Mandan tribe of the Great Plains of North America and across to the Tuareg rock groups of the Saharan Desert, Gruff Rhys, one of Britains most beloved and successful singer songwriters, has always been willing to follow an opportunity, wherever it may lead him. At this point I quite like working with serendipity, he says. Not in a cosmic way, but I try and leave things open to chance encounters and chance geography. As Im around 25 albums in Im always looking for ways to make a differentsounding record.Gatefold soft pack CD with pullout poster.Available to independent retailers on Blackberry NeoNeapolitan coloured vinyl in a split door sleeve. Gruff Rhys Vinyl is available for home delivery from Vinyl Records London, only £26