Following the release of 2022’s ‘When It Comes’, Dana Gavanski has returned with her third album ‘Late Slap’, which dropped on 5th April 2024. Watch the album opener, ‘How To Feel Uncomfortable’ HERE and order the album HERE.
There’s a party in Dana Gavanski’s head and everyone’s invited – well, kind of. ‘Late Slap’, Gavanski’s third album, gives voice to the highs and lows of the mindscape in all its joys and terrors, injecting some much-needed playfulness into the process of writing about emotionally hard things. “The album holds together the seemingly disparate aspects of my character that I have sometimes tried to repress,” says Dana. “With this album I’m letting them into the room, celebrating them for all their strangeness – a strangeness which I think we all, on some level, share.”
Having (literally) lost her voice during the writing of her previous album, ‘When It Comes’, ‘Late Slap’ finds Dana in magisterial mode, displaying a newfound confidence and energy—in both her writing and singing—borne, paradoxically, from embracing feelings of discomfort. “I realized,” says Dana, “that in order to become stronger I needed to get used to being uncomfortable.” It’s appropriate, then, that the album opens with ‘How To Feel Uncomfortable,’ a quick sonic punch of a song, which bemoans the growing distances between people in the digital landscapes where we spend so much time wandering aimlessly: “stand too close, face in your phone/ it’s scrambling your mind/ tired of your zombie glow/soaking up your eyes.”. The song attests to the difficulty of sitting with yourself, in boredom, insecurity and indecision—and the important emotional and spiritual rewards of doing so. Or, as Susan Sontag, a major influence on the album, puts it in “Regarding the Pain of Others: “It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anaesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration…”.
‘Late Slap’ tracklist:
1. ‘How To Feel Uncomfortable’
2. ‘Let Them Row’
3. ‘Late Slap’
4. ‘Ears Were Growing’
5. ‘Singular Coincidence’
6. ‘Song For Rachel’
7. ‘Eye On Love’
8. ‘Ribbon’
9. ‘Dark Side’
10. ‘Reiteration’
Dana is taking to the road in support of this new album and will be heading around the UK and Europe from this month. She will be performing live in Brighton at The Prince Albert on 22nd May. Purchase your tickets HERE.
