Sadness Sets Me Free

Release Date 26 Jan. 2024
In stock
Grouped product items
Product Name Qty
Sadness Sets Me Free - Blackberry Neopolitan Vinyl + Signed Print
$25.48
Sadness Sets Me Free - Black Vinyl LP + signed print
$22.08
Sadness Sets Me Free - CD
$13.58

Albums will ship to arrive around January 26, 2024. Initial vinyl orders will include an autographed album print and LPs will come packaged in a unique 'container door' front opening sleeve. Blackberry Neopolitan vinyl is exclusive to Rough Trade records webstores and independent record stores. Pre-orders will be entered to win an exclusive test pressing.

Gruff Rhys is pleased to announce his new album Sadness Sets Me Free, which will be released by Rough Trade Records on January 26, 2024. Incredibly, this will be the 25th album of his career (individually, collaboratively and as a member of various bands) that has spanned 35 years.

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.”

Tracklisting

Sadness Sets Me Free

Bad Friend

Celestial Candyfloss

Silver Lining (lead balloons)

On The Far Side of the Dollar

They Sold My Home to Build a skyscraper

Peace Signs

Cover up the Cover up

I Tended My Resignation

I’ll Keep Singing