Following the release of Adwaith’s second album – the krautrock-influenced, industrial odyssey of 2022’s Welsh Music Prize-winning Bato Mato – the Carmarthen band found themselves drawn back to the raw simplicity of their earliest days writing music together. Back in the beginning, growing up in the Welsh town of Carmarthen, they would create songs out of loose, evolving fragments, steadily building over the course of hours. And when it came to making ‘Addo’, Adwaith returned to these older ways of working, crate-digging back into formative influences such as Juliana Hatfield and Hole, and sketching out the outlines of the song live as the band’s Hollie Singer and Gwenllian Anthony jammed together in the latter’s bedroom. Later, they finished the track – the first glimpse of their third album, which is out next year – at Black Bay Studios in the Outer Hebrides, and enlisted none other than Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield to play guitar on the single.
Though ‘Addo’ – Welsh for ‘Promise’ – takes influence from the bright, melodic grunge of the Breeders and Liz Phair, it’s lyrically one of the trio’s darkest songs to date. “’Addo’ is about relationships in life that drain you,” the band explains, of ‘Addo’s message. “It’s about caring deeply for someone self destructive who doesn’t care about themselves, and how when you’re involved in these relationships, it distorts your view of the world and the people around you.”
With a harder exterior, entwined harmonies and an affecting melodic hook, ‘Addo’ builds into glimmering, squalling guitars, it makes space for an empowering and ultimately hopeful realisation: you’re better off without them, promise.
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