Gareth Donkin Announces Debut LP 'Welcome Home'

London-based singer-songwriter and producer Gareth Donkin announces his debut album Welcome Home with the single “Something Different,” a buoyant dance floor-ready song about change that pairs his honeyed vocals with flourishes of ‘70s and ‘80s touchstones like Earth, Wind & Fire and Prince.

The album will be released on August 25 via drink sum wtr, a new label formed by A&R Nigil Mack, in partnership with Secretly Group, as a part of the newly minted All Flowers Group. Fans can now pre-order Welcome Home digitally and on vinyl via Bandcamp.

“The version of ‘Something Different’ you hear was birthed one late night in June of 2020, during lockdown,” shares Donkin. “I set out to create a song with bouncy drums inspired by late ‘80s/early ‘90s West Coast hip-hop. I came up with the chord progression almost instantly when jamming out on a bright string-like synth patch, and once I had the main groove locked in, the song kind of arranged and wrote itself. This song is incredibly special to me, as it takes from so many different points/musical bursts I’ve had in the last three to four years.”

“Something Different” follows the singles “Whenever” and “GEEK OUT! (ft. quickly, quickly and The Breathing Experiment),” which have been praised by Wonderland, The Luna Collective, Lucid Monday and KCRW, who described “GEEK OUT!” as “infectious, joyful, and flavored with sunny Sunday afternoon goodness, this exclamation-point of a track… is a surefire crowd-pleaser.”  

Born with perfect pitch, Gareth Donkin was already fanatically obsessed with both jazz piano and drums before he turned 12. In high school, he began DJing and teaching himself to record and sample. By the time he headed to the Leeds Conservatoire to pursue a degree in production, he was already writing and recording his own material at home. Donkin’s first single, “Catharsis,” racked up more than 1,000,000 streams to date on Spotify, and a series of subsequent releases found similarly organic success. 

Written and recorded in a series of bedroom studios in England and France, Donkin’s self-produced debut album Welcome Home showcases the 23-year-old’s stunning mix of instrumental virtuosity and emotional intuition, blending highly sophisticated melodic and harmonic craftsmanship with deeply moving lyrical explorations of longing, desire, and determination.

The songs here draw on soul, funk, pop, yacht rock, hip-hop, jazz, and even bossa nova, hinting at times to everything from Michael Jackson and Bill Evans to George Benson and Jamiroquai. For more insight into Donkin’s inspirational palette, fans can check out his hand-curated “lifted” Spotify playlist, which features eclectic musical references such as The Isley Brothers, Bill Withers, Genesis, Erykah Badu, Pharoah Sanders, TOTO, and more.

Donkin’s performances on Welcome Home find him layering up instrument after instrument in the best one-man-band tradition of Prince or Stevie Wonder. The end result is a moving work that’s equal parts brain and brawn, a masterful coming-of-age self-portrait from a young artist discovering himself — and his sound — one song at a time.

Photo Credit: Simone Thompson

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