Cardiff ‘s Breichiau Hir spent 2022 playing shows and hitting the festival circuit pretty hard, including a notable blow the roof off set at FOCUS Wales. Debut album ‘Hir Oes I’r Cof‘ has been out approaching twelve months, and today the band release a video for the album closer, ‘Dal Lan Gyda’n Hun’, which we are delighted to premiere.
The song (‘Keeping Up With Myself’ in English) with tender beginnings swells into a mighty passion still remaining thoughtful throughout, something of a Breichiau Hir trademark.
The animated video was put together by the designer, video-maker, animator and friend of the band, Michael McCann.
Soulless illustrations build cold rooms in the video, before erupting and breaking apart, coinciding with the song’s explosive chorus. Images such as the plaster ducks on a living room wall hark back to familiar past times.
‘The Dal Lan Gyda’n Hun music video is a sentimental one in a lot of ways, reflecting much of my own disposition during its making. Early in the process, overarching themes of Hir Oes I’r Cof were discussed and we loosely settled on ideas of nostalgia; ideas that may be altogether vague and unreliable.,’ Michael says. ‘Thus, the concept revolves around displacement through inertia and, whether it be rightly or wrongly, it represents a profound feeling of emptiness in modern times, an anachronism of place, and a hope for change is inevitable.‘
‘The album follows a vague narrative of getting totally lost in nostalgia, slipping further away from reality. Dal Lan Gyda’n Hun closes the album with a slight note of hope that things are getting better. As soon as we finished writing Dal Lan Gyda’n Hun, we knew it was going to be the album closer. It had that feeling from the beginning,’ adds the band’s lead vocalist Steff Dafydd .
‘We love what Michael came up with for this video – he actually sent us about 5 ideas, and we loved all of them. We let him do whatever he wanted – he’s a brilliant artist. We’ll have to revisit his other ideas for the second album!”
Catch Breichiau Hir play in October:
15 Oct – Ty Tawe, Swansea
22 Oct – Sŵn Festival, Cardiff
