LATE SLAP is Dana Gavanski s third album, recorded in Margate with Mike Lindsay (tunng, LUMP (w/ Laura Marling) during the autumn of 2023.
"This album is my take on the tension between cynicism/despair and openness/trust. It is about tenderness in a world that is constantly trying to desensitize us.
During the writing of this album, I changed my songwriting process and started using Logic for the first time. This helped me build little sound worlds that I would not otherwise have heard just playing a guitar or the piano. I was able to loosen up and try things I may not have otherwise tried as my relationship to the guitar has mostly been quite folky in the way I play. I developed the sound and structure of the songs first, freeing up my voice, and I felt naturally more playful with it, vocally personifying different parts of my personality that may sometimes feel contradictory but in reality exist all together in a kind of strange Dana-brain party. So rather than suppressing my own neuroticism I wanted to explore what that could sound like through my voice, while also being able to then jump between different musical moods, bouncier songs sitting beside more sensual slow pop. Through these songs I was learning how to let my doubts and fears into what I was doing, to welcome them as little sprites with something to offer, rather than try to pretend that they do not exist." - Dana Gavanski
There is a party in Dana Gavanski s head and everyone was invited- well, kind of. Late Slap, Gavanski s third album, gives voice to the highs and lows of the mindscape in all its joys and terrors, injecting some much needed playfulness into the process of writing about emotionally hard things.
Gavanski fleshed out the demos with her band before taking the album—and the band—to Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) at MESS, the producer s studio in Margate. The five-piece, which includes Gavanski s fellow co-producer James Howard (Rozi Plain, Alabaster dePlume), tracked the record over five days.
"Ears Were Growing," encapsulates the eighties zeal of Talking Heads or Klaus Nomi, pitching fantasy against reality through a playful lyric about negative self-talk, the domestic interior, and their way of creating a kind of Stockholm Syndrome equal parts comfort and fear. "Ribbon," is a tender song about the recent loss of a childhood friend, looks at the world through the lens of grief, marveling at the way the familiar suddenly loses its meaning and shape. The gently propulsive "Song for Rachel" approaches the same subject matter from another angle, finding release in the simple, straight-to-the-point chorus refrain of “Cause youre gone/ its just that Im lost/ and I dont know how to feel.” Not knowing how to feel, Gavanski shows us, is as valid and important a feeling as any other.
Late Slap s unsettling artwork places the album themes in plain sight, Gavanski s ambiguous, animated expression and screened-out black eyes bearing witness to what might be a revolving exhibition of contradictory images: cute play-fighting kittens giving way to pictures of suffering and war, golden hours dissolving into lost hours never to be reclaimed. But Late Slap is also what its title suggests - a sudden jolt, a shock to the system that seeks to reconnect with the messy flesh-and-thought humanity of simply being human. The album s tension between cynicism and trust, openness and despair, melodrama and silliness, ultimately invites the listeners in (throw your coat on the bed over there, stranger). It welcomes you at the door, and beckons you to find tenderness in a world doing its best to desensitize us.
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