Gruff Rhys

One of his era’s most idiosyncratic figures in pop, Gruff Rhys launched his path in the noise-pop outfit Ffa Coffi Pawb, achieved prominence during the mid-nineties fronting the Welsh neo-psychedelic collective Super Furry Animals, and has sustained a solo trajectory defined by harmonically lush and stylistically restless output. While still active with SFA he first ventured outward, issuing the Welsh-language Yr Atal Genhedlaeth in 2005 and forming the electro-pop duo Neon Neon with Boom Bip for two albums. Following Super Furry Animals’ 2010 disbandment, Rhys embarked on a sequence of large-scale undertakings that included the 2014 multi-platform American Interior, the orchestral Babelsberg in 2018, and the glam-inflected Seeking New Gods in 2021. By the arrival of his twenty-fifth album, 2024’s Sadness Sets Me Free, his independent catalog had delivered a comparable tally of unexpected turns and standout moments to his years with SFA.

Born in Haverfordwest, Wales, in 1970, Rhys composed his initial song at age five—an eccentric vignette concerning a locomotive engineer reflecting on mortality. He later served briefly as drummer for the Creation Records act Emily before founding Ffa Coffi Pawb, whose ranks overlapped with future Super Furry Animals personnel and members of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. Between 1988 and 1992 the band released three albums that traversed guitar-based terrain from abrasive and eccentric to hallucinatory and melodic. Even before Ffa Coffi Pawb concluded, Rhys had begun performing with a prototype version of SFA that initially explored left-field techno before pivoting to left-field guitar pop colored by his characteristically oblique and whimsical lyricism. After a run of widely praised singles and albums, he delivered his first solo statement, the Welsh-language Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, in 2005. When Super Furry Animals signed with Rough Trade, the label likewise issued his sophomore effort, Candylion, in early 2007. That same year Neon Neon unveiled Stainless Style, an electro-pop concept album centered on automobile magnate John DeLorean. In 2010 Rhys stepped away from SFA again for the duet album The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness with Tony Da Gatorra, then returned in 2011 with his third solo album Hotel Shampoo, produced by Andy Votel. He rejoined Boom Bip for Neon Neon’s 2013 release Praxis Makes Perfect before immersing himself in the expansive multimedia project American Interior—an album, film, and book that followed Rhys across the United States in pursuit of the story of eighteenth-century Welsh explorer John Evans and his quest for a lost Welsh-speaking Native American tribe. The project surfaced in 2014, the same year Rhys scored the film Set Fire to the Stars, incorporating jazz and easy-listening textures. His creative scope widened further when he wrote the libretto for Stephen McNeff’s 2017 opera 2117/Hedd Wyn.

Rhys issued the orchestral Babelsberg in 2018, recorded with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The following year he collaborated with South African electronic musician Muzi on Pang!, an album sung predominantly in Welsh and shaped by multiple strands of African music. He next released Seeking New Gods in May 2021, a mythological narrative centered on a volcano that was partially tracked during a brief Mojave Desert residency and mixed by Mario Caldato, Jr. After touring the record with his band, Rhys composed the soundtrack for the film The Almond & the Seahorse. Upon completing the final date of that tour, he and his live ensemble—pianist Osian Gwynedd, bassist Huw V Williams, former Flaming Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock, and vocalist Kate Stables of This Is The Kit—immediately relocated to a French studio to begin work on what became his twenty-fifth album. Drawing from an array of seventies idioms that encompassed orchestral country ballads, airy soft rock, Baroque Brazilian pop, and sleek disco, Sadness Sets Me Free appeared in January 2024.