Dana Gavanski

Dana Gavanski is a Canadian singer-songwriter, of Serbian descent, resident in London. Her first record was released in 2017 and she is currently signed to Full Time Hobby in the UK. After developing her music for a year she released her first EP, Spring Demos, in 2017. On 27 March 2020, Gavanski released her debut full-length album, Yesterday Is Gone. Exclaim! music magazine, which had declared Gavanski as one of “eight emerging Canadian artists you should hear,” awarded the album 9/10. Music website Monkeybiz described the album as “a beautiful work of art”] BBC Radio 6 Music made Yesterday Is Gone it’s album of the week.

There’s a party in Dana Gavanski’s head and everyone’s 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. “The album holds together the seemingly disparate aspects of my character that I have sometimes tried to repress,” says Dana. “With this album I’m letting them into the room, celebrating them for all their strangeness – a strangeness which I think we all, on some level, share. In the writing of Late Slap, Gavanski swapped out the familiar for the new, training herself to use Logic Pro rather than just her usual guitar-and-voice approach. If composing somewhat neo-Luddite anthems on a Macbook seems a little contradictory, well, that’s kind of the point: “21st century life is so full of contradictions and headfucks that it can be hard to do anything with conviction—you could cynic your way out of doing or believing anything.” Initially overwhelmed by its seemingly limitless possibilities, Dana began to create demos and collages of small sound worlds across various influences, at times orchestral pop, art rock and new wave, again embracing difference and variety.