According to Spotify, Super Furry Animals’ ‘Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir’ was my tenth most played song on the platform in 2018. That sounds about right. I wouldn’t know the numbers exactly, but I do remember listening to that one a lot that year, for sure. It was then that I was in my first job out of university. I was working in a music studio, in a position that didn’t require a lot of supervision, and a lot of time was spent listening to artists’ discographies in the large gaps between having actual tasks to do. I went through SFA’s over a week or something. Radiator, being the band’s second album, was the second in the list. Even though that particular record had been in my personal iTunes library since about 2014, it was during that relisten that my ears pricked up when ‘Torra…’ was playing out of the speakers. So there you go. Sometimes you leave an album alone, you come back to it years later, and a song on there you never thought twice about becomes one of your favourites.

Super Furry Animals are a band from Wales, a country part of the United Kingdom. The people of Wales do speak English, but they take pride in their native Welsh language too. This is a roundabout way of getting to the point that ‘Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir’ is sung completely in Welsh, if you were confused when laying your eyes on the song’s title. Translated, it means ‘Cut My Hair Long’, and the entire track is a request by its narrator to a pair of magic scissors so their long hair covers their ears, eyelashes, goes “right down to [their] arse”, and is in a state to the point that people refuse to sit next to the narrator on the bus. Again, it’s not like I know all of this off the dome, this website helped. The song’s just under two minutes in length, but it gets the job done. And it’s a special one in a way. Before making their Welsh language-only record, Mwng, in 2000, ‘Torra…’ was the only track on the band’s first three albums to be sung entirely in their native tongue.

On Radiator, ‘Torra…’ follows another sub-two minute track in the form of ‘Chupacabras’, a punkier composition and a bit of freak-out compared to the poppier, melodic route that ‘Torra…’ goes down. It’s cool to have such a whiplash in moods provided by the two numbers. Even if I can’t properly sing along to ‘Torra…’, failing in getting the pronunciation down and so forth, it doesn’t stop me from at least trying. One thing I like a lot about the track is that it doesn’t appear to have a chorus of any kind. It’s three repeats of the verse structure, with some variations in the lyrics, until it eventually gets to the “Siswrn!” bridge where the melody changes. But even then, that repeats itself a few times before going back to the verse again. And then when that verse is done, the final line is hammered home before the song burns out in some ascending synth swoops. It’s a song where repetition is key. Gets into your head much easier that way.