Y Dail (‘The Leaves’) is the musical project of 20-year-old Huw Griffiths from Pontypridd, South Wales, writing in both Welsh and English. Starting in 2020, the band have released a string of singles which have received excellent reviews and single-of-the-week awards on music blogs and websites. Forthcoming debut album Teigr has been several years in the making, and is partly inspired by Griffiths’s love of 70s Welsh-language pop he remembers from school discos and his parents’ record collection. He also cites Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Joe Meek, Television and early Prefab Sprout as influences. With the album’s completion and release delayed by the inevitable pandemic story, 2021 saw the deceptively young Griffiths juggling finalising the record with studying for his A Levels, eventually putting the finishing touches to the record with producer Kris Jenkins (ex Super Furry Animals) at Grangetown Studios, Cardiff in the lull following. Since then, Marc Riley has championed the band on his BBC 6Music show, calling Griffiths’ songs “perfect pop”, and national treasure Gruff Rhys has called the band “magnificent”, with Y Dail previously performing a radio session for BBC 6music’s Huw Stephens, who has been a long term fan. Their 2022 standalone single Whizz Kids was released via much-loved Welsh language label Libertino Records (Adwaith, CHROMA, Sister Wives) and featured on Domino Records’ Sound System playlist.

What How Says: “: “I wrote and recorded ‘Silly Boy’ when I was 17, listening to XTC and reading Carson McCullers. The lyric is about a weird imagined encounter between a young city boy and a mystical, druidic slate-mining villager in North Wales.”

“It’s a glam pop song inspired by lines from William Burroughs’ sci-fi Western novel The Place of Dead Roads, topped and tailed with Wings-y Moog synth.”

“I wrote and recorded Whizz Kids in an afternoon on a 4-track. There’s a Paddy MacAloon quote: ‘I wanted to be Picasso with a JX-3P synth’. I suppose Whizz Kids is me trying to be Brian Wilson with a Casiotone keyboard and an acoustic guitar. The music video was inspired by the French Situationist concept of the ‘dérive’ along with Baudelaire’s celebration of the ‘flaneur’. It was filmed at 6 am on the streets of Cardiff, Wales on the hottest day of the year, intercut with footage captured in Courdes-sur-Ciel, France.”

His Mixtape:

Prefab Sprout – Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone)

Paddy MacAloon working in his father’s garage writing songs in between pumping gas. The poet, the troubadour, Stephen Dedalus with a 4-track. This was Prefab Sprout’s debut single, summed up perfectly by Michael Bracewell as ‘ecstatic melancholy’. The language is dazzling and strange, the production understated and the performance ardent. Haunting, Cubist pop excellence.

Richard Davies – Sign Up Maybe For Being

There is something about this song that means that I can listen to it time after time, and it still sounds fresh and gives me the same kick. It’s entrancingly all ‘ee’ end-rhymes, and it’s the aural equivalent of ice cream. The lyric is sheer poetry and startlingly original, maybe the best lines being ‘as the bus drives across the freeze to DC/I realised it could be really heavy/In the night candles light the mystery St. Louis’.

Carole King – Sometime in the Morning (demo)

A lesser-known Monkees track, this is Carole King’s sublime demo of her own song. It’s a perfect evocation of innocence in a 2-and-a-half-minute pop song, and I love her understated, pure and heartfelt singing. Lou Reed would have killed to have written this in 1966. I’d say this is the most beautiful song she ever wrote.

Toro y Moi – New House

Genius minimalist laptop pop. I love the disarming mundanity of the lyrics, with its yearning for domesticity and a life away from the road. The video is gorgeous, with its rainy, melancholic urban landscape. Chaz’s general insouciance is refreshing.

Aldous Harding – Passion Babe

This song really gives me goosebumps, and I can’t quite understand why. I find Aldous’s unnervingly childlike singing and her beautiful mumbling of the lyrics supremely moving and bewitching. She must be one of the best and most original lyricists writing today. She reminds me of modernist Imagist poets like H.D. and Marianne Moore, with enticingly cryptic, mystical lines such as ‘You can have the Pelican/Swim him ‘til the river’s running clear’ and ‘On the beat, in the snow/It’s on me and it costs a lot’. I also love the dryness of the recording (and of the whole Warm Chris album), and its almost eerie minimalism.

Super Furry Animals – Ice Hockey Hair

I think this was 3 separate tracks spliced together on tape. It has possibly my favourite ever fade-out chorus, (‘Now that you’re here, tell me you’re a non-believer’), which I always want to go on forever and ever. Twisted pop perfection.

Broadcast – Michael A Grammar

Trish Keenan was a genius, and Tender Buttons, from which this track comes, is a masterpiece. The lyrics are disorientating and brilliant. I believe Keenan was influenced by automatic writing, and Gertrude Stein’s verbal cubism here. Her singing is somehow simultaneously warm and detached; the combined effect is spine-tingling.

Wire – Outdoor Miner

Wire are known for more abrasive, angular material, but this is like a post-punk Beatles song. Colin Newman’s vocal delivery is brilliantly boyish and naïve, and the band’s performance perfectly imperfect. If I had to choose a track to be sent into space for extra-terrestrial civilisation to groove to (like the Voyager Golden Record), I’d choose this.

Teigr will be out on April 5th. Look HERE for more information on Y Dail.