• Video Premiere: The Elephant Room – Juniper and Pine

    Dublin-based indie-noise outfit The Elephant Room are one of a select number of DIY artists in Ireland assimilating a broad range of influences from the 60s through to the present year with complete seamlessness. We’re pleased to be premiering their sprawling new single ‘Juniper & Pine’, complete with the band’s self-made video. The song itself is an almost ten minute marriage of experimental noisecraft and lo-fi pop that somehow never outstays its welcome as ekes out new levels of its conceptual framework. Easing in with a Laurel Canyon-indebted neo-psych groove, its lysergic-soaked corners quickly darken into a clamorous sonic ego-death parallel, before returning to consensus reality as something familiar, yet altered.…

  • Video Premiere: Buí – Something Else To Talk About

    Despite their relatively young age, kitchen sink indie rock five piece Buí have been crafting some of the most earnestly well-crafted power-pop tunes around. Not ones to tread the beaten path, they debuted with a fully-fledged long-player in 2017’s Eugene, and have since been built their DIY profile from the ground up. The video for new single ‘Something Else To Talk About’ is an astounding feat – an 8-bit video game animation that not just acts as an apt visual companion to the song, but functions as its own winsome arcade fable. As if the band were collectively assimilated into a Scott Pilgrim fever dream – each…

  • Video Premiere: Grave Goods – Source

    Ahead of only their third show to date, supporting Beak> this Saturday, May 18 at Whelan’s, tri-city post-punk trio Grave Goods have kindly given us a first recorded glimpse of their visceral power. ‘Source’ is the first release from a session filmed by experimental filmmaking platform IMPATV, which records & broadcasts the heavier side of DIY, experimental & underground culture. Featuring members of Pins, Girls Names and September Girls, ‘Source’ forgoes the brooding atmospheres & jangle of the aforementioned in favour of primal urgency. More than delivering on the promise of its constituent parts, Sarah Grimes & Phil Quinn’s Girl Band-recalling rhythmic syncopation lay claustrophobic, anxious loops between which Lois MacDonald’s buzzsaw guitar finds voids to…

  • Video Premiere: Shrug Life – 2009

    One of the finest cuts from last year’s A Litany of Failures Vol. II independent compilation was Shrug Life‘s ‘2009’, a misleadingly uptempo ditty that mined reprieve from the jowls of self-imposed doom. Matter-of-factly delivered, Danny Carroll addresses the effect of the too-often underexamined (by musicians) abuse of bad hash as a crutch in times of mental ill-health: “Days previous I felt like a genius; sleepless, but safe in my cure for cancer, awake for six nights, working on the answer.” Of the track, Carroll said: “‘2009′ is an awkwardly accurate description of where I found myself in my late adolescence – suffering from sleep-deprived psychosis, perpetually…

  • Video Premiere: Casavettes – I’m Not Here, I’m Somewhere Else

    It’s just five days from the release of Limerick emo trio Casavettes‘ debut album, Senselessness. One of the pillars of the DIY LK community, new single ‘I’m Not Here, I’m Somewhere Else’ is a low-key diversion from their anthemic early-Biffy inspired work, with its glacial guitar conjuring myopic images of that post-relationship confusion and detachment. Tastefully shot by the band and edited by Colm O’Shea, its non-linear monochrome video was inspired in part by All This Can Happen by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton, revealing lived layers of undefined beginnings and endings by dividing the frame in two. Artwork for both ‘I’m Not Here…’ & Senseless comes from Laya Meabhdh Kenny, with…

  • Watch: Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies – Full-Time Mad Bastard

    Sure he only put out one of our Irish tracks of the year in ‘Never Coming Back’ at the tail end of 2018, but Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies‘ second EP, Post Millennium Tension, is with us, and so too is the video for lead single ‘Full Time Mad Bastard’.  Generally speaking, he’s one of the best at chronicling & satirising every social issue imposed by the elder half upon the younger half of the island’s consciousness. He’s is back with a hot new visage for the year, with an album in the works, he was one of our 19 for ’19 acts for good reason. …

  • Video Premiere: Post Punk Podge feat. TPM – Government Security

    One of our 19 for ’19 featured artists, Limerick’s Post Punk Podge and the Technohippies are back with another establishment-botherer in the form of ‘Government Security’. Tackling the insidious danger of their hapless rep, given what they’ve been at recently, it’s another timely number from one of Ireland’s foremost Zeitgeist-catchers. Mixed by Theodore Vain and featuring a cameo from Dundalk duo TPM, this single precedes his forthcoming EP, Post Millennium Tension – out February 15. One of the most engaging live performers and prolific acts on the isle, Podge is currently working on his debut album, a mixtape, and astonishingly, ‘Government Security’ won’t even feature on the new EP. Grab the track…

  • Video Premiere: Arthuritis – Let’s Touch

    You might have missed idiosyncratic Cork auteur Arthuritis inconspicuously dropping one of the best Irish releases of 2018 at the end of November. Released through Cork independent label KantCope, I’m Great pulled off that rare balancing act of being equal parts opaque and inviting, its shards of influence – electronic, minimalism, drone, R&B, psychedelia, dreams (presumably) – painting vividly abstract images of an alien, dissociated consciousness, and one that’s all the more human for it. Following on from his wealth of releases – that include the deservedly-titled Neglected Ambient Shirts Vol 1 – lead single ‘Let’s Touch’ and its accompanying video are as good a Rosetta Stone for his output as you’re likely to…

  • Video Premiere: Junior Brother – The Back of Her

    Back in January, we featured Kerry experimental folk artist Ronan Kealy AKA Junior Brother as one of our ones to watch in 2018. From making his mark at Electric Picnic, Metropolis, Other Voices and elsewhere, to being lined up for a spin on Cillian Murphy’s BBC 6Music show on December 23, he has made good on the promise and then some Sealing the deal on a very busy year – one that was spun into motion via last year’s ‘Hungover at Mass‘ – is the serene and singular ‘The Back of Her’. It’s a wistful and unravelling heart-stung paean that distils the essence of Kealy’s craft to…

  • Video Premiere: Any Joy – The Fall

    Cork indie-psych outfit Any Joy have just unveiled the new video for new single ‘The Fall’. Soaked in reverb, it’s another out-of-focus opiate drip to distract from more pointed undertones. Following the band’s aesthetic & musical thread of reccurent patterns, the video was created by frontman Oisin Dineen. Of the track, the band says “It’s a soundtrack to a potential self-sabotage and ultimate demise. It could be an appropriate theme tune for the current state of affairs across the Irish sea.” ‘The Fall’ comes from Any Joy’s new EP – due out next year – following up on their excellent & hugely underappreciated 2017 debut LP Cycles and this summer’s ‘Sucker‘ from A Litany of Failures…