Gemma Hayes shares detail of 'Blind Faith', her first new album in a decade - set for release September 27th
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Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter Gemma Hayes has shared details of her long-awaited sixth album Blind Faith, set for release on September 27 through Townsend Music via Absolute Label Services on LP, CD, cassette and digital formats. The Irish musician's first new album since 2014's Bones + Longing is accompanied by a UK headline tour, including Londons Union Chapel on September 28.
Produced by Hayes with Karl Odlum, David Odlum & Brian Casey, Blind Faith features Lisa Hannigan on backing vocals on "Eye For An Eye" and "Feed The Flames," which she also co-wrote, while Paul Noonan duets with Gemma on "Another Love."
Having taken the time and space she needed to figure out what she wants to tell the world. Hayes has plenty to say, with Blind Faith diving into themes of longing, empowerment, freedom and repression. While Hayes's songwriting is as personal as ever, its abstract nature allows the listener to sink into each song, immersed by tender guitar picking, eerie synths and swooning cello. It's made all the more remarkable given this is Hayes's first album in a decade.
"I stopped writing for a long time, for many reasons, one of which was simply that I lost the urge to write," she explains. Raising two young children, her energy was going elsewhere. "I found the first few years of motherhood really hard, so the idea that I could just get up on stage deserted me for a while. I lost my confidence, and I found myself not having a connection to music in any way. I went from talking about music every day, living and breathing music, to... I could go a month without music."
Then came the events of 2020, and a sudden relocation from London to West Cork. "We were living in a ground floor flat in Battersea, with just a patio and a brick wall, and then Covid hit, so we came back to Ireland. We literally upped-sticks and headed to Baltimore, West Cork, where my husband's family had a little holiday house on the coast. And when we got there, I discovered it had a music room with a piano. So all of a sudden I found myself in this house, in the music room."
"Songs began to murmur, distil and rise up in my mind," continues Gemma. "I would lock myself in the room, usually late at night when the world was asleep. I knew I needed to capture them before they left me. Some are about a weird restless longing that's very hard to describe in words, some are about grief not just of loved ones but of places and moments past. Some are simply for the joy of playing and singing."
This is precisely what Hayes expresses on Blind Faith, those moments of pure exhilaration, despair, heartache or joy. She loses herself in the music, turns everything inside out, or else offers up moments of quiet and reflection. It is an extraordinary, career-defining work from one of Ireland's most gifted and unique artists.
"The longer I'm on this planet, the more I feel as though death, birth and living mean things get pared down to what really matters," concludes Gemma. "Some people figure that out years earlier, but it's taken me this journey to get here. To realise what's important."
The youngest of eight children raised in the small village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, Gemma Hayes' introduced herself to the world with her 2002 debut Night On My Side. With its deft production, ambitious arrangements and Hayes' dreamy, rock-leaning vocal delivery, the album was a critical and commercial success and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.
Since then, she has released four critically acclaimed studio albums and a limited-edition live album, while her music is constantly in demand for film and TV placements. Her version of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game", recorded for the US TV series Pretty Little Liars, now has over 24 million streams on Spotify alone, while she recently contributed to the soundtrack of the film adaptation of Roddy Doyle's Greyhound of a Girl.