SXSW Artist Spotlight: Gwenno
SXSW 2026 kicks off on March 12 in Austin, Texas. We’re excited to spotlight some of the outstanding artists performing at the festival this year. 360°Sound had the pleasure of a chat with Gwenno Saunders, more widely known as simply Gwenno. A Welsh singer, songwriter, and producer, Gwenno is a true Renaissance artist.
She’s been an actor, a radio & TV presenter, and a dancer. She’s toured with the likes of Elton John as a synth player, and she was part of the retro girl group The Pipettes in the mid-naughties. She’s an advocate for Welsh independence, and was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh in 2019 for “services to the Cornish language through music and the media.” She’s released four solo albums. Her latest, 2025’s Utopia, is packed with atmospheric pop songs that flirt openly with the psychedelic.
Gwenno will be performing in showcase on Thursday 12 March at the British Music Embassy at the Palm Door in Austin, and on Sunday 15 March at Swan Dive, as part of the FOCUS: Wales showcase. She’s also performing in-store at Vertigo Vinyl.
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview on our YouTube channel @360degreesound.
360°Sound: What’s important for new listeners to know about your origin story?
Gwenno: Origin stories are interesting, aren’t they? I really admire people who create a mythology around them and make stuff up. Perhaps I should have made more stuff up. Real life is chaotic enough, and a little bit messy, which is certainly my path. It’s been quite varied. I’ve been very curious.
Your songs and your art really reflect the places that you’ve lived and grown up, and the languages that you speak. Utopia is your first primarily English-language song cycle. You’ve written almost exclusively in Welsh and Cornish previously. What inspired the choice this time?
I left home when I was 16, and I joined a dance show called Lord of the Dance. I was a competitive Irish dancer, a quarter of a century ago. My life then became very English language, even though I was around the Irish and I lived in North America. I lived in Las Vegas, and I worked at one of the hotels there when I was 17. So I realized the impact that the English language had also had on me. My thing is always about the relationship between languages. Particularly in Britain, it’s about how those identities feed into each other – how they live in tandem, how they talk to each other. I just felt it was right. I’d been singing exclusively in Welsh and Cornish for ten years. Before that, I was in The Pipettes, which was an English indie pop band. I was ready to bring [English] back in, because it was reflecting another part of my life. And as an artist, I think you’ve got to use all the tools in the box. I felt like I was ready to pull it in, because English is just a ginormous language; I wanted to explore it again. I was curious.
I read a quote in which you said, “Utopia captures a time of self-determination and experimentation. These are songs of discovery, of the years between being someone’s daughter and becoming someone’s wife and someone’s mother.”
It is about self discovery. It was cathartic to remember all the people I tried to be over the past 25 years. And I was just thinking a lot about how quickly this quarter of a century has gone. I’m an 80s kid, so I remember the last century. I remember the physical world, and I just wanted to document what I’d seen before everything changes. Because I do feel like we’re at this really crucial point where it really feels like everything is going to change quite dramatically.
It sounds like Utopia is almost like a memoir.
[The record is] just a postcard, really. I was in reflective mode. I was raised in a very Celtic household that actually completely ignored North America, and I was curious to go back and see what influence it had had on me. Las Vegas gets dismissed as a place at all because of how people feel about it. And I’m always curious when places are a bit of an underdog. I lived and worked alongside people who, work in hotels and casinos. Vegas is a very working class town. And that’s my vibe – I just love people. Everyone’s got a story.
How was Utopia different from previous projects that you’ve worked on?
[Previously] I’ve written everything on the piano – I’ve been an electronic producer, predominantly, up until this point. [This time] I have a band, and we’ve been playing for a long time. We always make our records in the living room, right here. We had Llŷr Pari on drums and Tad Davies on bass. I was on piano, and then Rhys [producer Rhys Edwards, her husband, collaborator, and multi-instrumentalist] was on piano sometimes. It was a more collective recording situation, but still very low fi, y’know.
“Dancing on Volcanoes” was the lead single from Utopia.
The last finance minister of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler came in, said, “We are dancing on the edge of a volcano.” It was a really interesting parallel, between what I wanted to express and the fact that that had happened at that point almost a century ago, at a not dissimilar tipping point as today. It was also another chance to sing about dancing.
I do take issue in the video for the title track. You seem to be equating Las Vegas with utopia.
I used to go to a nightclub in Las Vegas called Utopia, which is partly what that song is about. It’s an ode to being a teenager, and those dreams that you have. But also ‘utopia,’ in the original Greek means ‘non place.’ The ideal place is ‘E’ [eutopia]. So [the word we use] is slightly different. So I really liked that there was this quite generic name, utopia, and that it meant non-place, which I think Vegas is – it’s a non-place.
The song “War” is particularly poignant right now with the global resurgence of authoritarianism that we’re experiencing. Some lyrics really struck me, such as, “Who came of age to die?”
It’s a poem written by Edrica Huws [20th century textile artist], who lived in Wales. She was also a poet, and she wrote this at the turn of the Second World War. It’s a poem that I’ve been singing since 2018 and every time I sing it, it just feels more relevant. It’s about how powerless we feel in our lives, but [accepting that] does empower you.
Can you tease a little bit of what you’ve got planned for SXSW?
I’m excited. I’m going to do something slightly different, because South-by is such a party. I was going to do a quiet piano set, but that’s not gonna work. It’s going to be a little bit more energetic. I’m definitely standing up. I’m doing an in store – that’ll be my only piano set that I do, unless I jump on someone’s piano at some point when I’m drunk.
Check out the full video interview on our YouTube channel, @360degreesound:
