Clara La San In this Darkness (instrumental)

Happy new year everyone! I'm happy to release "Wolf Moon", a rather long and strange "single" from my forthcoming album of songs. It's  available as a free download from the home page of my website at https://danielland.co.uk - or you can get it at my Bandcamp page at https://danielland.bandcamp.com

Wolf Moon

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".

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 a master craftsman'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".

Another Year Older

In This Darkness Instrumental  Clara La San (slowed Down)

English shoegaze singer, multi-instrumentalist, and "Dream-Pop Cult Hero" Daniel Land has announced his third album "Out of Season", a set of reflections on memory, history, and identity in post-Brexit Britain.
 
"Lemon Boy" is the first single to be released from the album, and it is a delicious slice of summery shoegaze with a subtle literary twist.
 
Daniel produced and performed the record at home in London, and at a temporary studio in a static caravan on the remote West Somerset coast, working mainly alone due to the challenges of the Covid pandemic. On "Lemon Boy" he plays all of the instruments — apart from one rhythm guitar part, which was recorded remotely by his bandmate Gary Bruce, in his studio in Normandy. 
 
Like much of Daniel’s work, "Lemon Boy", is imbued with allusions to the heroes of gay literature, in this case Tony Kushner's era-defining gay play "Angels in America", whose lead character is mentioned in the lyrics of “Lemon Boy”. Daniel refers to the new album "Out of Season" as a "Dream-Pop Album on National Themes" which also echoes the full title of Angels in America.
 
Elsewhere, the video for "Lemon Boy" references the distinctive Super-8 style of the legendary queer director Derek Jarman — another inspiration for the album.

"What I love about Jarman", Daniel says, "Is that he had a deep and abiding love for England, but it was a very complicated, critical and a very queer kind of love. This was very much my mood, going into the making of this album".
 
Although the majority of the tracks on "Out of Season" deal with the weighty themes of nostalgia, and nationalism, Daniel is keen “Not to shove things in people's faces or be too po-faced — tracks like 'Lemon Boy' are the little bits of sugar that I've scattered through the album, to help the rest of it go down".

And what a delightful aural confection it is, comprising Daniel's trademark sonic nods to his favourite artists — Cocteau Twins, The Blue Nile, and Slowdive — all topped off with the voice that The Guardian once described as "The offspring of Elizabeth Fraser and Anthony Hegarty". It is the kind of music that BBC Radio 1 once said was "The kind of thing the late John Peel would have loved".

Lemon Boy

Lemon Boy (Radio Edit)

Daniel Land has returned with new single ‘Alison’, from "Out of Season", which dropped on limited Deep Sea Green vinyl on January 26th, and also available via streaming services. Purchase here: https://danielland.bandcamp.com/album/out-of-season

"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.

Daniel says: “Alison is the title of a famous Slowdive song, and the band Swimming Tapes also has a track with the same name. My bass player, Rob Sykes, who wrote part of the song with me, joked that it’s actually the law that every shoegazer, eventually, has to have a song called ‘Alison’. Obviously, the band Slowdive is a big influence on my sound, but the song is called ‘Alison’ because the chorus melody and lyrics arrived just like that, in my head, fully formed. I tried changing it, but the song just resisted… ‘Alistair’ just doesn’t have the same ring, and when I tried ‘Madison’, it sounded like I was singing about Wisconsin..."

"As a gay man, it'd be unusual for me to address a song to a woman; perhaps Alison is trans (something I'm suggesting in the song's video) or from a Lusophone country (Alison is quite a common boy's name in Brazil and Portugal). But I really have no idea who Alison is..."

Alison (Radio Edit)

This is a very old track found and remixed the stems.

Ariel

From my most recent album, 'The Dream of The Red Sails', available at https://danielland.bandcamp.com/album/the-dream-of-the-red-sails

The Dream Of The Red Sails

The Dream of the Red Sails

Capistrano Beach

White Chalk

Former mainman of Daniel Land & The Modern Painters, now living in London and working solo, with a new live band. Also make ambient records as Riverrun.

White Chalk

Daniel Land

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