English shoegaze singer, multi-instrumentalist, and “Dream-Pop Cult Hero” Daniel Land returns with a brand new single ‘Another Year Older’, lifted from the new album ‘Out of Season’.
‘Another Year Older’ is an intimate and arresting indie-shoegaze offering, showcasing a poignant concoction of personal nostalgia and warm reminiscing. Daniel says: “Another Year Older is a step into the more usual territory (for me) of memory, desire, and relationships. In the past I’ve often been guilty of hiding my vocals with reverb, and deliberately obscuring what I’m singing. I think I’ve got a lot more confidence these days, and so the vocal – and the lyrics – are much more up front. I’ve been inspired by the frankness of a lot of modern queer poetry — writers like Ocean Voung, Andrew McMillan, and Andrew Hahn. I’m sure most people don’t pay that much attention to my lyrics, but for the curious, lines like “Seventy tenths of an inch / Disappear right behind your lips” might raise an eyebrow or two.”
Daniel Land’s first album – Love Songs For The Chemical Generation, released under the name Daniel Land & The Modern Painters – was called “One of the finest records of its time” by Drowned In Sound, and “Like Slowdive reimagined by Phil Spector” by the NME. It is now widely considered to be a classic of the shoegaze genre, although Daniel remains, in the words of The Skinny, a “Dream-Pop Cult Hero”, known only to the shoegaze cognoscenti.
That might be set to change with the release of Daniel’s new album, Out of Season, his third as a solo artist, and fifth overall, and undoubtedly his most ambitious record to date. It is released on limited-edition Deep-Sea Green vinyl on 26 January 2024. Out of Season is a series of reflections on history, memory, and post-Brexit Britain, which was inspired by Daniel’s return to the landscapes of his youth – the rugged, underpopulated west coast of Somerset, where he has spent increasing amounts of time since beginning the album in 2019. Out of Season was written and partly recorded there, in a static caravan overlooking the coast, during the period when the UK was tearing itself apart over its relationship to Europe.
In recent years Daniel has become both a scholar and a practitioner of the kind of music he creates, studying towards a PhD on artists like the Cocteau Twins at the London College of Music, while collaborating with artists like Darkher and Siobhan De Mare. He is currently writing a memoir about homophobia.
In a genre is often maligned for its lack of engagement with the real world, Daniel uses the sonic conventions of shoegaze as a backdrop for a distinctly outward-looking exploration of memory, identity, and desire, approaching his work with a steadfast vision and an auteur’s attention to detail.
Lauded by Mark Radcliffe, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, and many others, he makes the kind of music that, in the words of BBC Radio 1’s Rob Da Bank, “The late John Peel would have loved”.
