If there’s a sense of uncompromising space to Bato Mato, the recent album from Carmarthen-based trio Adwaith on Libertino Records, then it is only a product of the environment in which the record was dreamed up. Having won acclaim for debut Melyn, including success at the Welsh Music Prize in 2019, the band had a few new songs rattling around when they took a trip deep into Eastern Europe on the Trans-Siberian Express. But the sight of frozen Lake Baikal and the haunted brutalism of cities like Ulan-Ude caused a creative sea-change. A sudden realisation which saw Adwaith shelve what they had to work on something new.
“I strangely saw similarities between there and Carmarthen,” drummer Heledd Owen says of cold deserted streets. “You could kind of sense this loneliness. It felt like this empty city.” Confronting this less hospitable side of life became central to Bato Mato. Where Melyn offered wistful, impatient dreams of growing up, the new record faces adulthood in all its stark reality. A place often mythologised beyond the hard truths of the everyday.
But for all of the visceral, post-punk weight, Bato Mato is also a colourful and inventive record. A melting pot of styles which draws upon any number of psych, grunge and dream pop influences to realise its sound. Thoughts turn once more to Ulan-Ude. A confluence of different cultures, where Russian, Mongolian and Chinese styles converge into a city harsh yet singularly striking. With Bato Mato, Adwaith offer the sonic equivalent. An album born of travel and distance, pieced together from segments of other places, but ending up very much unique.
We took the opportunity to chat with the band to find out a little more about the record, so read on below:
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us and congratulations on the second album! How was the experience compared with that of your debut?
Thank you! I think we are definitely more confident in our sound and songs this time around. I don’t think we’d change anything about the album which is a really good place to be in!
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Were there different pressures after winning the Welsh Music Prize in 2019? Or did the recognition help you find your feet as a band?
It definitely gave us the confidence in what we were doing. I think there was definitely a pressure to follow up on Melyn but that feeling went away quickly as soon as we started writing it.
I’ve read Bato Mato is at least partially inspired by a journey through Siberia and Mongolia. Could you talk a little about the story behind the record and how it impacted upon the sound?
It was such a crazy experience start to finish. The landscape was so bare and vast. The city we visited was industrial looking and was kind of forgotten about. The space around us really inspired us to write a big sounding album.
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There also a certain anxiety to many of the tracks. An unease which shadows even the more triumphant numbers. I think the video of ‘Wedi Blino’ does a great job capturing this. Could you speak on this dimension of the record?
Melyn was about growing up in your teens and the problems that arise but also about the positivity you have as a young adult. Bato Mato is, in a way, a continuation of that. The realisation that life maybe isn’t that good and the anxieties that come along with that.
I wanted to ask about the responsibility of writing and recording in Welsh. There haven’t been many artists working in the language within the indie scene, especially not women. Do you see yourselves as torch-bearers for the Welsh language? Challengers of English hegemony? Or just artists working with what comes natural?
I think for us, it was definitely a natural thing for us to do. We were inspired by Welsh language music and the scene so it wasn’t something we thought about. Now, I think we really want to bring Welsh music to the world and we feel very honoured to be able to do that.
What’s next for Adwaith? And if you could take a trip to inspire the next record, where would you choose to go?
We do have a few trips abroad coming up that will maybe inspire the next record! We have a tour for the album and some festivals over the summer. We’ve already started working on Album 3 so hopefully that will be out in the near future too!
Bato Mato is out now via Libertino Records you can grab it from the Adwaith Bandcamp page.
