GRUFF RHYS
Sadness Sets Me Free
A rich harvest of succour a waits on Super Furry veteran’s euphonious almanac of sorrows.
By Pete Paphides
Gruff Rhys: got problems but a 99 ain’t one
MARKJAMES
Rhys’ low-key radicalism coexists with a sense of wonder
ROUGH TRADE
8/10
THE process of writing from the title down is a proven way of conjuring art from a blank page. In 1994, Manic Street Preachers wrote the entirety of their final album as a four-piece after Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire decided that calling it The Holy Bible was a suitable scene-setter for the gravity of the sentiments expressed therein. In 2017, Saint Etienne’s cache of love letters to Metroland assembled itself only once the trio decided their next project would be called Home Counties. It’s interesting, then, that this was also the process by which Gruff Rhys started work on the successor to 2021’s universally acclaimed concept album (about asacred mountain on the North Korean border), Seeking New Gods.
The neon light depicted on the sleeve art reads ‘Sadness Sets Me Free’, but if it mirrored the grammatical emphasis of his 1996 hit with Super Furry Animals, “God! Show Me Magic”, and became Sadness! Set Me Free, it would shine a keener light on what Rhys has allowed himself to do here. On an album of songs that “feel melancholic or… deal with shit things”, it’s important to state that, at no point, does the listener feel like they’re taking a holiday in someone else’s misery. That’s even true of “Bad Friend”, which details a miserable caravan holiday in west Wales. It’s actually the sweetest song on the record; a string of reassurances to friends and loved ones that, although our protagonist might sometimes fall short of his own standards, “bad friends are still friends/And better than an enemy/ And I will be there at the end”.