Due for release 7th August 2026 via Last Night from Glasgow
CD / Indies Transparent Burgundy + signed print
As We Once Were is the third studio album from twice Welsh Music Prize
nominated artist and producer The Anchoress (aka Catherine Anne Davies) -
This new record is the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art
Of Losing and features an all-star cast of guest vocalist, including Mercury
Music Prize nominees Hannah Peel and Welsh-Cornish musician Gwenno,
long-time collaborator James Dean Bradfield from Manic Street Preachers
also contributes vocals and electric guitar on 'Throw Over Your Man' - a song
inspired by the love letters between literary legends Virginia Woolf and Vita
Sackville West - and newcomer Eaves Wilder (Secretly Canadian) duets on
'Damsels'
The Art Of Losing received wall-to-wall critical plaudits upon its release in 2021 and
scooped up a raft of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the
Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it "one of my favourite records of the year"
and Caitlin Moran calling it "the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this
moment", it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of
mouth.
Three-times Music Producers Guild nominated Davies created the new album at Black
Lodge Studios, while being given access to Pete Townshend's collection of vintage
analogue synthesisers to produce an epic 14- track widescreen exploration of the
nature of time and transformation. ?
Against the backdrop of the birth of her first child, after multiple losses and the
discovery of her grandmother's voice on a long lost cassette tape in her mother's attic,
Davies found herself asking the question: "What can we build out of the past? Are we
destined to be held down by it? Can we ever return to these past versions of
ourselves?"