The Friday Dispatch

Bonnie Kemplay gets her wings

Back in 2021, a shot in the dark chance win at the Radio 1 Live Lounge competition against 10,000 entries earned Bonnie Kemplay a signing to Dirty Hit and a support slot with The 1975. But shortly after, Kemplay had to step back, dropping out of her undergraduate guitar program and taking time away from the spotlight due to a repetitive hand strain that left her unable to play.

“After the competition, I came back to my uni flat in Manchester with all these Dirty Hit vinyls and totes,” she says. “There were a lot of eyes on [me] after everything happened so fast. People were watching. It makes you think, like, I need to write another song like that – that there needs to be a level of upkeep and that suddenly you’ve got a lot to lose.”

Despite hitting the ground running with a top-notch indie, Kemplay knew she couldn’t continue at that pace with her injury. Eventually, she had to drop out of school and move home to heal. “I think a lot of people thought I dropped out because I got signed… but it was actually because I had quite a bad injury and couldn’t finish my studies as a guitarist,” she explains.

But in some ways, taking that time off allowed her the space she needed to write and reflect. “The EP is a bit more reflective. I was in a headspace of feeling very nostalgic and thinking about who I am and who I want to be and where that all comes from.”

“Bones”, the EP’s oldest song, charts those three years away. “I just couldn’t really do much. I felt like the only reason I was leaving the house was to go see physiotherapists, and the song is about moving around between those people’s care, and then the strangeness of moving on and never seeing them again. I got on really well with my physio. We’d lend each other books and have really good chats and he felt kind of like a friend. I guess the song is about that experience, the injury, and being cared for.”

With the release of Someone, somewhere, she is, without doubt, now fully in control of her artistic voice, and it is a voice that feels both quietly joyful and completely self-assured. The time away has allowed something beautiful — and perhaps even unexpected — to come to the fore. “I was so pedantic about everything,” she says of her attitude to creating now. “I’m definitely less of a perfectionist now. I like recordings that feel a bit imperfect.” - Josephine Illingworth

The profound laughter of Gelli Haha

You’ll find Switcheroo – the debut album from Idaho-born Gelli Haha – somewhere “between Studio 54 and Area 51” – but at the beginning, our new favourite party girl was straight-edged. Angel Abaya worked in Idaho for local arts organisations, releasing sweeping folk-rock music under her government name. There is a premonition of Gelli Haha even then, in the squirming synths and proclivity for touches of electronic strangeness. But the curtain fell when she moved to LA in 2021, building her anew after the pandemic razed those old familiarities to the ground.

Meeting Sean Guerin of De Lux, Gelli Haha was born. Together, they plundered toyboxes of vintage synths to create billowing soap bubbles of disco, sleazy, Euro new-wave pop and collages of chaos. “A big thing for me on this record, and why I wanted to make something different, was because I took myself too seriously,” Abaya shares. “And I wanted for people to take me seriously as an artist, but that was no fun. Now, it’s the reverse: people take me seriously even though I’m not taking anything seriously at all. I’m getting what I wanted just when I realised it’s not what I want anymore. It’s not my focus. I don’t care what people think about me, I just want to create an experience that changes people and moves people … I feel very understood and seen with the weirdness of it all.”

We stepped into the “Gelliverse” for the first time for her homecoming show in Boise, Idaho for Treefort Music Fest earlier this year. It’s a trippy, soft-play world of bubbles, primary colours, inflatable sea creatures and optical illusions. From the beginning, Abaya wanted to reconcile her musicianship with her background in dance production: or, create “a multimedia living art project.” Gelli Haha was not a costume or an alter ego, but an extension of herself she intended to embody completely.

“I love it here, I love coming back,” Abaya says of her Boise homecoming. “It’s cool to see friends who I’ve known for a long time, and they’ve seen this whole progression of how I grew up in the scene here and how things have changed since. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, but there’s a lot of special feelings especially around Treefort.”

The music and culture festival in Boise excavates the city’s subcultures and brings them to light, with a thriving underground scene and the crowd-drawing might of headliners including Geese, CMAT and Magdelena Bay. Its community-first mindset, founded by artists for artists, is exactly the kind of place a phenomenon like Gelli Haha could one day evolve.

Abaya was part of the festival’s press team for five years, as well as a teacher at Boise Rock School which nurtured young, emerging talent in the city. “Boise has shaped me in every way, who I am artist and the experiences that got me here. I grew up here in a really interesting time. Once, it was a place you would grow up in only to leave – and now, I think people stay more often than not because there is culture here and something to be a part of. I felt like I could be a pioneer of something and build things with people that made an impact in arts and culture. That prepared me for being a small fish in a big pond in LA, in a weird way. I got my time to shine in Boise and gain that confidence,” she says. “I swam back. It’s like the salmon that live in the river and go to the ocean and swim back. That’s such an Idaho thing to say! But I’m a salmon who travelled back.” – Sophie Leigh Walker

This is a week of monumental releases that’ll likely end up in many year-end lists – among them YEARNALISM, Baby Rose’s first record for Secretly Canadian, Ebbb’s gloriously slanted debut Shallow Hits, and Kelela’s new avatar. Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortizis returns with a mixtape titled 1331 under their Sad13 sideproject – with each song a minute long; Panda Bear and Sonic Boom have their second collaboration A ? of WHEN; NYC hardcore heroes Show Me The Body have Alone Together; and indie’s current great hopes she’s green have the seven track swallowtail that we’re calling an album even if they’re saying it’s an EP.

The introduction… Patchwork

If you’re into evocative folk, you’ve arrived at the right place. Raised in Bermuda but now living in London, Patchwork has been hitting the ground running in the capitol’s live scene, turning heads at iconic venues like The George Tavern, which is where we first caught wind of him. His first single “Angie?Mary” is out now.

Name… Patraic O’Donnell

Age… Somewhere between 22 and 23

Hometown… St George’s, Bermuda.

Describe your sound… Folk rock pop to call your folks that rock (and tell them you love them).

How you started making music… I started making music purely out of fun childish things. Usually I wrote about my favourite characters or just singing to my self in my room making a song up.

Artist you’d most like to write with… Iris Billinsky.

Film that changed you… Sing street.

Best dinner in London…. I don’t eat out much at all but I live right next to Ochi’s in Shepherd’s Bush and that is amazing Caribbean food with lovely people.

Follow Patchwork on Instagram

Lucinda Williams on Bob Dylan

I talk about this all the time. I talk about it in almost every interview I’ve ever done about everything, because Highway 61 Revisited was the first Bob Dylan album I ever heard. So, it was the album, and no pun intended, but we revisit that album a lot and that song, because now, doing interviews for my album, Good Souls Better Angels, everybody keeps asking me about the Biblical references. I started quoting one of the lines from the song “Highway 61 Revisited,” where Dylan goes “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son,’ and Abe said, ‘Man, you must be putting me on.’” I’ve been using that as an example of referencing Biblical stuff in a song.

Not just that song, but that whole album was a big turning point in my life. When I heard that one I was like 12 and a half years old. I didn’t quite understand it all at the time, but with his stuff back then it was hard for anybody to understand a lot of it, because it was steeped in all this mystery and everything. That certainly turned my little 12-year old head around.

The thing is I’d come from two worlds. To me, that album blends together the literary world and the traditional folk world, both of which I came out of. At that time, I was listening to Woody Guthrie songs, playing Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and traditional folk songs. Of course, with my Dad [Miller Williams] being a poet and that whole literary world, when I heard this album it was like those two worlds came together.

Well, it’s funny that the way I heard that album was this student of my Dad’s — a young poet - came over to the house with a copy of it. Back then when a new album came out like that it was a big thing — “The new Bob Dylan album is out!” — and he brought it over to the house. My Dad wasn’t really into Bob Dylan all that much, but the guy went into my Dad’s office for them to have a meeting and he left the album out in the living room. And so I put it on the turntable. This was 1965 and I put it on the turntable and it blew my 12-year old mind.

I can remember my Dad’s creative writing students; I remember a lot of times hearing them debating about whether Bob Dylan was a poet or a songwriter. The younger writers would say, “He’s a poet, he’s a poet.” And my dad would say, “No, he’s not a poet, he’s a songwriter. There’s a difference.” I remember that.

Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist

Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists. Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Biita Houdei, Ceebo, Starcleaner Reunion, Really Good Time, Elanor Moss, Sarah Meth, and coverstar Lonnie Gunn.

“The public so often want to freeze the artist in a moment in time when they were at their peak, and they want the artist to revisit it over and over again as if it was something authentic.” – David Sylvian