Gruff Rhys has announced a new record called Sadness Sets Me Free for next January and a Dublin date for February.
The Super Furry Animals singer and solo musician of some repute has announced Sadness Sets Me Free his new solo record to follow on from Seeking New Gods on Rough Trade Records to be released on January 26th 2024. The album is his 25th he has been involved in.
A Dublin date at the Sugar Club follows on February 15th 2024 courtesy of Singular Artists, and Rhys plays Empire Music Hall, Belfast Valentine’s Day, February 14th.
Tickets €28 plus fees for Dublin and priced £22.50 plus fees for Belfast on sale Friday, 13th of October at 9am
Here’s the new song Celestial Candyfloss:
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 Animals archivist 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 19th-century house, Gruff and his road-hardened 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 cross-continental activity was Gruff’s most accomplished and beautiful record to date.
In a career that has taken him from the slate-mining 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 Britain’s 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 I’m around 25 albums in I’m always looking for ways to make a different-sounding record.”
