In a week, Sŵn Festival will take over some of Cardiff’s biggest venues to highlight Welsh and international musicians for three days.

On Sŵn’s Saturday night, Alice Costelloe will perform her latest album, Move On With The Year: a debut collection of eclectic indie-pop tracks.

Ahead of her performance, Gair Rhydd managed to chat to Alice about songwriting, performance and anything Cardiffians should know before coming to her show.

Compared to Alice’s EP and singles, Move On With The Year marks her largest and most long-term project to date.

In this album, Costelloe’s style is freer than ever.

These songs flit between a diverse mixture of instruments, from the traditional sounds of the flute and recorder, to the harsh, monotonous ringing of an ex’s telephone.

While her instrumentation reflects the lack of limits Costelloe has found in her solo career, they never stray far from the emotional hub of her songs.

Instead, they reflect her raw lyricism, giving listeners intimate insight into her feelings of rejection, thoughts on marriage and womanhood; ‘I don’t see myself,/ all dressed in white’.

When we spoke with Alice, she understood how these songs open her up to listeners, and told us how reciprocal this exposure has been as fans deeply resonate with the album; “they say it sounds like the album is about their life, or parents, or about this. That kind of response means a lot”.

As Alice left the band Big Deal in 2016, she commented on how different the writing process felt alone.

While she “enjoyed being able to make the creative decisions” on these songs, she felt “just stuck in [her] bedroom, basically, for six months” which, inevitably, “does make you feel a bit crazy”.

Therefore, the meaningful response Alice has received not only at shows but internationally online, redeems her “six months of feeling like a strange hermit on a deadline”.

However, it’s clear that there are difficulties to consistent live performance.

When asked if Alice repeats the same lines, stories or jokes between songs, she remarked this is something she has not mastered, instead she “never knows what to say and will just say something, whatever comes into [her] head”.

Hilariously, Alice shared that she once spent a ten-minute power breakdown during a French gig reciting her French GCSE aural presentation (which she failed!).

For students with tickets for Sŵn, “that’s the kind of chat that is getting said between the songs”.

Making music has always been a central passion for Alice. As her music-themed French monologue proves, Costelloe spent her childhood flitting between various musical instruments, seeing what sounds she could mix into songs — viewing them as “vehicle[s] for writing”.

This album, then, has truly been lifted from her bedroom to the big stage, as Alice reflects on feeling brought back to her youthful creative processes writing alone; “Rather than just failing at doing some complex things that I’d need to practise loads to do them. I was just playing how I would play at home and just, kind of, experimenting with things”.

This enthusiasm explains how Alice keeps herself committed to music during tough times.

When asked what advice Alice would give to budding Cardiff musicians, she told us, in a personally rather moving moment, about the bizarreness of when Alice realised that “not everyone has something that they are passionate about”.

“So, even if it feels insanely hard, and doesn’t make any sense financially, feel glad that you have this interest in something that means so much to so many people”.

Alice Costelloe plays in Cardiff at Sŵn Festival on the 17th October 2026 and is certainly one to check out.