When: 7pm on Thursday 12 May 2022
Where: Gorilla, 54-56 Whitworth Street West, Manchester M1 5WW

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been postponed and now takes place in May 2022. Original tickets will be valid and all other details will remain the same.

UPDATE: This show has now sold out!

We’re delighted to be bringing Andy Shauf back to Manchester – this time, to Gorilla!

Andy Shauf released The Neon Skyline, his most direct and emotionally-rich work yet, in January 2020 via ANTI-.

The interconnected songs on The Neon Skyline, all written, performed, arranged and produced by Shauf, follow a simple plot: the narrator goes to his neighbourhood dive, finds out his ex is back in town, and she eventually shows up. As with Shauf’s last solo album, 2016’s The Party, The Neon Skyline is densely layered with an abundance of charming moments. His characters are all sympathetic here, people who share countless inside jokes, shots, and life-or-death musings when the night gets hazy. He offers the first taste, Things I Do, which examines the dissolution of the narrator’s past relationship over tense and jazz-minded instrumentation.

For The Neon Skyline, Shauf chose to start each composition on guitar instead of his usual piano. Happy accidents like Shauf testing out a new spring reverb pedal and experimenting with tape machines forced him to simplify how he’d arrange the tracks. Over the course of a year-and-a-half, Shauf ended up with almost 50 songs all about the same night at the bar. Though paring down his massive body of work to a single album’s worth of material was a challenge for Shauf, the final tracklist is seamless and fully-formed.

Shauf’s attention-to-detail in his writing on The Party evoked Randy Newman and his unorthodox, flowing lyrical phrasing recalled Joni Mitchell. Though that album, which followed different attendees of a house party, was his breakthrough, his undeniable songwriting talent has been long evident. Raised in Bienfait, Saskatchewan, he cut his teeth in the nearby Regina music community. In 2018, his band Foxwarren, formed over a decade ago with childhood friends, released a self-titled album where Pitchfork recognised how ‘Shauf has diligently refined his storytelling during the last decade’.

On top of heartbreak, friendship, and the mundane moments of humanity that define his songwriting, Shauf makes music that explores how easy it is to find yourself in familiar patterns and repeat the same mistakes of your past. His characters wonder, ‘Did this relationship end too soon? Would going to another bar cheer my friend up?,’ or ‘How hard is it to give a shit?’ The songs on The Neon Skyline ultimately take solace in accepting that life goes on and things will be okay.

Main support is Helena Deland. Someone New is Montreal’s Helena Deland’s first full length record. It follows her 2018 series of EPs entitled Altogether Unaccompanied, a two-year period during which she toured with Weyes Blood and Connan Mockasin, amongst others, opened for Iggy Pop in Paris and collaborated with JPEGMAFIA. After releasing it to unanimous critical acclaim in October of 2020, she will be presenting these songs for the first time to the European public supporting Andy Shauf in the spring of 2022.

Opening the show is Leith Ross. Leith Ross is a songwriter, singer, and artist born and raised in a small town outside of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. They’ve been a sensitive and overly artistic person since birth and when they started writing songs around the age of 12 it quickly became Leith’s favourite way to be sensitive and overly artistic. Still is. Since then, they’ve recorded and released two projects, and have a new one underway. Inspired by the likes of Lucinda Williams, Dolly Parton, Disney movie soundtracks, High School Musical, and their dad’s horrible parodies of all of the above, their songs attempt to explore themes of gut-wrenching and cheesy love, silliness and extreme existentialism. Their favourite stuff. Leith’s latest single, We’ll Never Have Sex, is soaked in that ‘favourite stuff’ and ready to be listened to wherever you can find it. Coming Soon To Some Kind Of Live Venue Near You!

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult. This show is a co-promotion with the Brudenell.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm,  WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

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