A sound reaction
Dave Owens
A WELSH language song has become the first to notch up one million plays on Spotify.
Congratulations to rock duo Alffa whose track “Gwenwyn” (Poison) featured on a number of influential Spotify playlists, achieving a global reach while scoring this landmark achievement.
“We weren’t expecting anything like this,” said guitarist and lead singer Dion Jones, who with drummer Sion Land were sixth form students at Ysgol Brynrefail in Llanrug, near Caernarfon.
The pair were chosen to be part of the Horizons project, a collaboration between Arts Council of Wales and BBC Wales, and are signed to Welsh label Recordiau Coch.
The label’s founder, Welsh musician Yws Gwynedd, said this landmark moment for Welsh language music had shown that “language barriers are being blown wide open”.
The past year has seen something of an explosion of unsigned Welsh bands hitting the heights on Spotify. Most notable are Cardiff outfits Himalayas and XY&O. While indie rock group Himalayas have enjoyed huge success with their track “Thank God I’m Not You”, which notched up almost nine million plays, the biggest success story from Wales in the last 12 months is XY&O, whose music has been heard a whopping 30 million times.
The electro pop outfit formed in Cardiff in 2015 and since then have become hugely popular on the music streaming platform, all while plotting world domination from a bedroom in Barry Island.
Consisting of Skip Curtis – vocals and rhythm guitar, Nick Kelly – lead guitar and Tudor Davies – keys and production, their irresistible brand of soulful electronica, which they describe as “haze pop”, has proved an enticing sound globally.
“We actually started out with a view to write songs for other people,” said Skip. “Some of our demos somehow got picked up and shared around in the US. We started getting emails from US radio stations asking who we were, so we decided to go with it and form a real band.”
Formed while the band members were still university students – Skip at Cardiff, Tudor at Exeter and Nick at Reading – the outfit have seen streams for their songs sky rocket because of what they say is “a bizarre set of circumstances”.
“We’re still not really sure how a band can go about getting that many streams to be honest,” said Skip. “Our very first single Low Tide has really led our streaming so far.
“We self-released it and were happy that we were getting a few thousand streams initially. Then, a few weeks into the release our streams started to shoot up and we were informed that Low Tide had gone into the Global Viral Chart on Spotify at no.7.
“We had some playlists support us, again, not sure how, and the streams started to snowball. Someone actually informed us after that had the current official charts rules been in place when we released Low Tide, it would have gone into the UK Official Top 40 at the time. But we just missed the rule change on stream counts.”