• Yawning Chasm – The Golden Hour

    August 31, 2022 - By 

    Galway’s Aaron Coyne has been making music as Yawning Chasm for over a decade now, but has flown conspicuously under the radar in that time. While some releases have come out via Galway’s low key but always excellent Rusted Rail label, others have simply been self-released on Bandcamp with all too little fanfare, including latest – and seventh – album The Golden Hour. While primarily a singer-songwriter, Coyne’s style steers clear of the generic. His unconventional main instrument is the four stringed tenor guitar, perhaps most well-known these days for its use by Warren Ellis on latter day Bad Seeds…

  • Pillow Queens – Leave The Light On

    April 11, 2022 - By 

    Pillow Queens’ sophomore album Leave the Light On smooths the cracks of their debut to unveil a near-perfect follow-up. Where In Waiting documented the rough transition from adolescence into adulthood through fleeting tales of young love and triumphs, Leave the Light On  pushes forward into something more settled. Through elegiac verses and changing perspectives, Pillow Queens construct a metaphorical space that inspects the cracks in its white picket fence. These anthems shine light on the marginalised and lonely as they navigate the mundane and everyday; it’s an album that yearns for the peace of domesticity, in a country that continuously…

  • NewDad – Banshee

    March 8, 2022 - By 

    Young Galway quartet NewDad hit the ground running with the release of their debut EP Waves in early 2021. Its fresh take on hypnotic dream pop and shoegaze sounds captured the hearts and minds of listeners and critics alike. On their follow-up, Banshee, NewDad have kept that momentum going, accelerating toward a dazzling future. Recorded in Belfast and mixed by John Cogleton (Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers), Banshee sees NewDad dig deeper into their sound, resurfacing with a handful of tracks that see them at their most daring, intense and captivating. Opener ‘Say It’, arguably the band’s most radio-friendly track…

  • Earl Sweatshirt – Sick!

    February 8, 2022 - By 

    Penned as a reflection on the world’s weakened mental condition amid the pandemic, and the heightened anger and isolation that came with the near universal inertia and entropy, Sick! is former Odd Future member Earl Sweatshirt’s fourth LP, arriving two years after his FEET OF CLAY EP and almost four years after his last full-length, Some Rap Songs.  With 10 tracks at a running time of just 24 minutes, the album is instantly comparable to its predecessor in terms of its pace. However, where Some Rap Songs is a murky, scattered aural journey, Sick! is comparatively smooth sailing. Sure, the wonky, glitchy…

  • M(h)aol – Gender Studies

    January 18, 2022 - By 

    M(h)aol’s intersectional feminist punk fury first entered public consciousness in 2016 with the release of their debut single ‘Clementine’. The song, inspired by Clementine Churchill’s anonymous 1913 letter to the Times in response to anti-suffrage campaigner Almost Wright, saw vocalist Roisin Nic Ghearailt’s flit seamlessly from a heavily affected robotic drone to a passionate wail, pitted against a guest vocal from Gilla Band’s Dara Kiely and murky, industrial guitar scratches. The band were rightly tipped for big things at this early stage. Then, there was nothing. Five years passed between ‘Clementine’ and its 2021 follow-up, ‘Laundries’, a reflection on one…

  • Ordnance Survey – Field Work

    December 22, 2021 - By 

    Outside of his work on keys and percussion for Dublin math-rock heroes The Redneck Manifesto and stints playing with Jape and David Kitt, Neil O’Connor has been quietly plugging away for years as one of Ireland’s finest electronic musicians and composers. While his Somadrone project started out in the realm of twitchy electronics and ambient vibraphone textures on early albums like Fuzzing Away to a Whisper, over the years it’s become more a fleshed out beast, adding weary vocals and occasional guitar on top of ice cold synths, like an intriguing blend of shoegaze and house. While we haven’t had…

  • Elaine Mai – Home

    November 15, 2021 - By 

    The title of Elaine Mai’s long-awaited debut album, Home, holds a lot of weight. Living through a pandemic changed the way we understand the meaning of the word, with many people left to create their own sense of home with what they had. For Mai, who has been an active figure in the Irish music scene for 10 years now, these nine tracks feel like a homecoming in themselves. Inviting a host of female collaborators to contribute to the album, this record further solidifies Mai’s esteemed place within the scene, and the home she has found within it. Home’s arrangements…

  • The Altered Hours – Convertible

    November 1, 2021 - By 

    Given that they’ve been releasing music for a full decade now, it’s easy to forget that Cork quintet The Altered Hours are only now releasing their second full length album, Convertible. It must be down to the quality of the EPs they’ve released along the way – no mere stopgaps, releases like 2013’s Sweet Jelly Roll or 2018’s On My Tongue house so much of their most essential material. Debut long player In Heat Not Sorry surfaced in 2016 – an excellent collection of tracks, but one that often took a slower and starker direction than previous releases in a…

  • Deafheaven – Infinite Granite

    September 1, 2021 - By 

    One could argue that Deafheaven are to so-called “blackgaze” music what the Sex Pistols were to punk rock: they weren’t the first on the scene, but the genre would be nothing without their influence. Black metal has incorporated atmospheric overtones since the early-to-mid-‘90s through the work of notorious acts like Mayhem and especially Burzum, and later groups such as Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room and Ireland’s own Altar of Plagues. Contemporary acts expanded upon the shoegaze Wall of Sound that tremolo picked guitars offered to include strings, synths and melodic passages, with Frenchman Neige being credited with providing the…

  • Horsey – Debonair

    August 18, 2021 - By 

    It was already evident from their slow drip of sporadic singles over the last five years that Horsey were a band lacking neither in ambition or invention, even if the inclination to get a record out seems not to have been a pressing concern. Their debut album, Debonair, is a little over 30 minutes long but within that span is a carnival cast of gonzo characters and leftfield sojourns.  The standard verse-chorus-bridge formula is accounted for, sure enough, but  what transpires between the first few seconds of a song and where it eventually winds up is anybody’s guess. If Jim Steinman…