This content is copyright of CelebMix.com. A decade may have passed between albums, but Iwan Rheon never truly left the creative orbit. Best known to global audiences as an Olivier-winning stage actor and as the unforgettable antagonist Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones, Rheon's musical return isn't marked by fanfare-but by something far more interesting. Now, his long-awaited second full-length album, I Just Wish I'd Never Gone To Space (out now via AWAL Recordings), lands with a dry, darkly witty wink. It's not a comeback-it's a continuation, filtered through time, experience, and a sharp, satirical gaze on ego, isolation, and the quiet mess of being human. Credit: Iwan Rheon The Billionaire in Orbit The lead single, "Hashtag," launches the album with satirical bite-sharp, punchy, and eerily on-point in today's world. Set against a muscular pop-rock backdrop, it imagines a tech billionaire drifting endlessly through space, his fortune meaningless in the void. "I was watching some tech billionaire's phallic rocket taking off," Rheon says dryly. "And I remembered vaguely, something about Newton's laws of motion-how, in a vacuum, the velocity of an object will always stay the same. So if anything goes wrong out there, they'll be just floating away forever." The image amused him: someone with unimaginable wealth, suddenly so powerless. "I could just imagine this billionaire floating around, all his wealth on Earth pointless, and he's wishing he'd never gone to space." The absurdity struck a nerve. That vision stuck, evolved into a metaphor, and eventually crystallized into the song that gave the album its name. Writing From the Margins Although I Just Wish I'd Never Gone To Space comes nearly a decade after Dinard, Iwan Rheon never truly stopped writing. "I never really planned to have this huge hiatus," he reflects. "It's just sort of the way things happened. Acting roles came along." But even as scripts took precedence, music never disappeared-it simply moved to the margins. Over the past five years, songwriting became a quiet, steady rhythm in the background, until the creative buildup could no longer be ignored. "It gets to a point where you just need to get the music out, otherwise it just lives in your head. And that's not necessarily healthy," he says. Eventually, returning to the studio felt inevitable-and welcome. "It was lovely to get back in the studio and record some new tunes." Photo Credit: Kate Stuart Photography Songs That Stayed, Songs That Didn't Still, not everything written during that period found a place on the final tracklist. A few songs, shaped during a breakup that coincided with the pandemic, were consciously set aside. "There were a few songs that I didn't feel I wanted on this album because I guess a lot changed since then, and I wanted to do something a bit more forward-thinking and relevant to now," Rheon explains. Some remnants of that era linger-"Fever" and "Party" in particular carry echoes of that earlier chapter, though even those span different timelines. "The latter is a really old song, but it felt relevant," he adds. The result is an album shaped by reflection -one that nods to the past without being defined by it. No, this isn't a breakup album; it's something more subtle. It charts a quiet transformation, a shift toward the present. Crafting Space: Sound & Collaboration Produced in collaboration with Chris Hyson and featuring Welsh twin musicians Lloyd and Alex Haines, I Just Wish I'd Never Gone To Space is a sonically diverse yet emotionally cohesive body of work. From the biting satire of "Hashtag" to the swelling optimism of "Forward Motion," the album toggles between irony and intimacy, without ever straying from its emotional core. "The sound came together in the room," Rheon recalls. Nearly every track-"all except for 'Agor'"-was already written before he entered the studio. The rest unfolded organically, through instinct and shared musical language. "Chris and I discussed a lot of references, bands and artists we liked," he explains. "He really gets it, and I really enjoyed creating the sound with him." Much like the themes, the emotional contrasts weren't premeditated either. "I don't think you really know what you're gonna start writing about until you start," he reflects. "The songs and themes just sort of happen." In Welsh, Inward Two tracks-"Agor" and "Y Gwenyn"-bookend the album in Welsh, anchoring the project in Rheon's heritage and offering a quieter, more introspective kind of emotional release. "Welsh definitely gives me a different freedom with writing," he shares. "It's like accessing a different part of me." Though he didn't plan for "Agor" to be bilingual-or to open the record-once it was finished, it simply felt right. "It felt like the perfect opening," he adds. "Y Gwenyn," on the other hand, was always destined to bring the album gently to a close. Photo Credit: Kate Stuart Photography Character vs. Self Though much of the album feels intimately