Dana Gavanski returns with new album LATE SLAP Released 5th April 2024 via Full Time Hobby
Dana Gavanski returns with new album LATE SLAP Released 5th April 2024 via Full Time Hobby
New single + video How To Feel Uncomfortable out now
Intimate live show at Folklore, London - 7th Feb
Following the release of 2022’s When It Comes, Dana Gavanski returns with her third album LATE SLAP, due for release 5th April 2024. Streaming now is the album opener, How To Feel Uncomfortable, which is matched perfectly with a disturbing and visually stunning video, directed by Ella Margolin.
Watch How To Feel Uncomfortable: https://youtu.be/HmT5SrNNEZM
There’s a party in Dana Gavanski’s head and everyone’s invited - well, kind of. Late Slap, Gavanski’s third album, gives voice to the highs and lows of the mindscape in all its joys and terrors, injecting some much-needed playfulness into the process of writing about emotionally hard things. “The album holds together the seemingly disparate aspects of my character that I have sometimes tried to repress,” says Dana. “With this album I’m letting them into the room, celebrating them for all their strangeness - a strangeness which I think we all, on some level, share.”
Having (literally) lost her voice during the writing of her previous album, When It Comes, Late Slap finds Dana in magisterial mode, displaying a newfound confidence and energy—in both her writing and singing—borne, paradoxically, from embracing feelings of discomfort. “I realized,” says Dana, “that in order to become stronger I needed to get used to being uncomfortable.” It’s appropriate, then, that the album opens with ‘How to Feel Uncomfortable,’ a quick sonic punch of a song, which bemoans the growing distances between people in the digital landscapes where we spend so much time wandering aimlessly: “stand too close, face in your phone/ it’s scrambling your mind/ tired of your zombie glow/soaking up your eyes.”. The song attests to the difficulty of sitting with yourself, in boredom, insecurity and indecision—and the important emotional and spiritual rewards of doing so. Or, as Susan Sontag, a major influence on the album, puts it in "Regarding the Pain of Others: “It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anaesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration…”
Record with Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) and her band at MESS, the producer’s studio in Margate. The five-piece, which includes Gavanski’s fellow co-producer James Howard (Rozi Plain, Alabaster dePlume), tracked the record over five days. “I knew Mike could help me find the range of sound I was looking for; he has an amazing attention to sonic detail and we’ve worked well together on previous records.” Lindsay acquired a Yamaha DX7 synth at Dana’s request just for the album, and they used it to conjure an atmosphere of digital warmth that recalls the Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s meditative masterpiece Keyboard Fantasies.
Late Slap’s unsettling artwork (see below) places the album themes in plain sight, Gavanski’s ambiguous, animated expression and screened-out black eyes bearing witness to what might be a revolving exhibition of contradictory images: cute play-fighting kittens giving way to pictures of suffering and war, golden hours dissolving into lost hours never to be reclaimed. But Late Slap is also what its title suggests—a sudden jolt, a shock to the system that seeks to reconnect with the messy flesh-and-thought humanity of simply being human. The album’s tension between cynicism and trust, openness and despair, melodrama and silliness, ultimately invites the listeners in (throw your coat on the bed over there, stranger). It welcomes you at the door and beckons you to find tenderness in a world doing its best to desensitize us.
LATE SLAP track list
Let Them Row
Late Slap
Ears Were Growing
Singular Coincidence
Song For Rachel
Eye On Love
Ribbon
Dark Side
Reiteration
LATE SLAP released 5th April on vinyl, CD and digital via Full Time Hobby. Pre-order various formats here.
