Dana Gavanski is very open about what Late Slap means from her perspective. “This album is my take on the tension between cynicism/despair and openness/trust,” she shared leading up to the album’s release today via Full Time Hobby. “It’s about tenderness in a world that’s constantly trying to desensitize us.” The lush, thoughtful instrumentation that veers from straightforward indie rock to operatic-leaning chamber pop to complex math rock illustrates these tensions and aims to expose that dichotomies are, ultimately, constructs.
After relocating from Vancouver to London and enduring a global pandemic (you know the one), Gavanski began losing her voice—for reasons that eventually were revealed to be both physiological and psychological. The recovery process took a year and a half, and her 2022 album When It Comes was made with this looming anxiety. “I remember on the first tour after things started opening up, I only managed to sing because I was sucking on a Vocalzone lozenge throughout the whole set and learnt to hold it on the side of my mouth while singing,” she recalled, advising against this method. “I constantly struggled to change my diet, my mind, and my relationship toward music and it felt like I was teetering between giving up and little successes.”
Slowly, things got better, more playful, less stressful. Gavanski’s career was no longer in jeopardy. Late Slap was made against this backdrop. “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 don’t exist.”
Read on for Dana Gavanski’s track by track analysis of her third album, Late Slap, and check out the record here.
1. “How to Feel Uncomfortable”
Expresses a desperation at how modern life cuts us off from each other, behind screens, eyes glued to the bright glow of our information addiction. How healthy is that for our minds, in a time that obsessively talks about self-care? Also the realization that often discomfort is not a negative feeling that one should avoid but rather explore. I feel my generation wants to avoid anything uncomfortable or disagreeable, using politeness as a defensive weapon rather than interacting with things in their full uncomfortable glory.
2. “Let Them Row”
The fluctuations of being a romantic and creative person who constantly jumps back and forth between cynicism and euphoria in a terribly expensive city.
3. “Late Slap”
“Late Slap” explores the desire to protect the thing that may be actually causing the most pain. The conflation of oneself with one’s insecurities that closes rather than opens us up, and the momentary relief and clarity of releasing one’s grip that is an ongoing exercise in self-awareness.
4. “Ears Were Growing”
An escapist’s dream that spirals back to the reality of still being stuck on the same old sofa with the same old thoughts. Thoughts that, though depressive and negative, have taken on a twisted but comforting companionship, a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Basically what happens when I try to make a Talking Heads-y song.
5. “Singular Coincidence”
I was contemplating the feeling of fear and the ignorance that governs a lot of human interaction, and trying to reclaim what makes human connection precious and powerful. Most people most of the time don’t know what they’re talking about, and yet they speak so passionately and combatively, often deepening the divide.
6. “Song for Rachel”
This song is dedicated to my childhood best friend who passed in 2022. It’s about unconditional love. I wrote the song from a place of sadness, but also of celebration of a person that had a profound impact on my life. I also wrote about Rachel in “Indigo Highway” on my last record.
7. “Eye on Love”
A picnic date that turns into a spider’s eye. It’s a little ditty that sounds sweet and sugary, but has a lot of attitude and humorous questioning within it. About watching someone or a relationship change out of nowhere and feeling the ineptitude of control, while not shying away from it either. Embracing the feeling of not “getting” something and that “something” not making any sense.
8. “Ribbon”
This is one of the first songs I wrote on the album soon after learning about my childhood friend Rachel’s passing. It explores grief and how the familiar can start to feel oppressive or meaningless.
9. “Dark Side”
How beauty often straddles the edges of desperation. It explores the insecurity in and of creativity, moving between different voices that may come and go, from calmness and inwardness to ecstatic escalation and exuberance. “Desperation, I caught it in my hand” suggesting the importance of looking at what may feel most uncomfortable.
10. “Reiteration”
Repetition and renewal. A meditation on love and the universal motion of things, relationships, and patterns we find ourselves falling into and out of. With a tentative nod to ritual and its healing qualities, the movement of the seasons, the things we often take for granted while the hours escape us.
