Daniel Land

Daniel Land’s first album of songs – Love Songs For The Chemical Generation, released with his Manchester band Daniel Land & The Modern Painters – was called "One of the finest records of its time" by Drowned In Sound, and "Like Slowdive reimagined by Phil Spector" by the NME. The album is now widely considered to be a classic of the shoegaze genre, although Daniel remains, in the words of The Skinny, a "dream-pop cult hero", known only to the shoegaze cognoscenti.

After a further album with the Modern Painters – The Space Between Us, released in 2012 – and shows supporting Neil Halstead (Slowdive) and Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins), Daniel moved to London, and released In Love With A Ghost (2016), his first album as a solo-artist. A sophisti-pop tour de force which referenced the lush electronica of Talk Talk and The Blue Nile, the album featured over twenty musicians, and was called "Gorgeous, lush and accessible, like fusion dining for the ears” by Noise Journal. Primal Music stated that Daniel demanded "Some kind of greater perspective or respect" for an album that was "built on the genius of performance, production, songwriting and sound”. 

Daniel's 2019 follow-up album, The Dream of the Red Sails, was a return to Dream Pop form and showed a true outsider artist at the peak of his creative powers, blending confessional poetry with blue-eyed soul vocals and starry-eyed dream pop – and some of the most direct lyrics of his career. The album's highlight was the widely-praised "Skindivers" – a song which looked back on a teenage affair with a boyfriend whose life was cut short by a motorcycle accident; the album received repeated plays on BBC Radio 6 Music's Radcliffe and Maconie show. 

More recently, Daniel has become both a scholar and a practitioner of the kind of music he creates, studying towards a PhD at the University of West London, where his mentor and thesis supervisor is the legendary producer Mike Howlett (Tears For Fears, OMD). Meanwhile, he has continued to release his own work – his new album, Out of Season, has become the best-reviewed and best-selling of his career – whilst collaborating with artists as varied as Darkher (Prophecy Records) and Swoone (Siobhan De Mare/Gary Bruce). He is also currently writing a memoir about homophobia.

Lauded by Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, Mark Radcliffe, and many others, Daniel Land makes the kind of music that, in the words of BBC Radio 1's Rob Da Bank, "The late John Peel would have loved".