• Premiere: A Ritual Sea – Seasons (Like You)

    July 19, 2018 - By 

    Set to be launched at Dublin’s Drop Dead Twice on August 9, ‘Seasons (Just Like You)’ finds A Ritual Sea mining pure inspiration from dream-pop, shoegaze and indie textures. The second single to be taken from the Dublin band’s forthcoming debut album – which is expected to arrive in early 2019 – the song explores the themes of fear, paranoia and falling in love, asking, as the band puts it, |if we ever really fully know another person; navigating the slow unveiling of our true personalities – changeable, unpredictable, and ever-shifting.” Filmed by Fabian Chombart in Lioux, a region in the South…

  • BICEP Announce Belfast and Dublin Dates

    July 18, 2018 - By 

    As part of a string of EU and UK dates, London-based Belfast electronic duo Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson aka BICEP will make appearances in Belfast and Dublin in November. As well as stopping out Belfast’s The Telegraph Building alongside Voiski (Live), Hammer and Schmutz on Saturday, November 3, the pair will play their biggest Dublin show to date at the Olympia on Friday, November 2. Tickets for the shows go on sale this Friday at 10am, priced at £27.50 and €31.40 respectively.

  • Laurel Halo – Raw Silk Uncut Wood

    July 18, 2018 - By 

    Somewhere in Apple Music headquarters, an employee, perhaps under the instruction of watchful label publicists, or not, input “techno” as the genre tag for Laurel Halo’s latest project, Raw Silk Uncut Wood. The Berlin-based experimental producer has spent the past eight years pivoting from frenetic, full-bodied techno and unconventional club electronics to dense, sentient ambient-pop, and back. Admittedly then, it is difficult to keep track. Her breakout album, Quarantine, released in 2012, was disembodied pop simmering beneath an off-kilter electronic surface—spearheaded by her drifting voice. It was, above all else, her ability to synthesise anxiety into quivering, twitching soundscapes that gave…

  • Chvrches Set For Irish Shows

    July 17, 2018 - By 

    As part of a UK and Irish tour to kick off the year, it’s been announced that Chvrches will play two Irish shows in February. The Scottish synth-pop trio – who have just released their acclaimed third studio album Love Is Dead – will play Belfast’s Ulster Hall on February 19 and Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on February 21. Tickets go on sale this Friday at 9am from Ticketmaster.

  • Various Artists – A Litany of Failures Vol. II

    July 17, 2018 - By 

    To be a contemporary “independent” band in Ireland isn’t merely a genre categorisation, but a complex creative actuality. There’s often a socio-economic subtext to the term, as happens when a multitude of younger or less experienced creatives don’t have the resources to view music as a full-time pursuit just yet. They must therefore look elsewhere to meet the frequently unforeseen costs that stack up when making music – gear upkeep, travel, recording/rehearsal space fees, etc. This can lead to an absence of parity at the level of industry power relations. Simply look at the cultural-economic logic followed by certain festivals…

  • Premiere: CATALAN! – Espionage

    July 16, 2018 - By 

    Despite having played only a handful of dates since emerging in July last year, Ewen Friers’ self-coined insurgency rock project CATALAN! has made a considerable dent on the Northern Irish music scene over the last few months. His latest effort, ‘Espionage’ has felt like bona fide single material since we first caught wind of it at a show in Belfast back in October. In characteristic Friers fashion, it commingles wide-eyed hope with full-blown melodies, and fuzzed-out bombast with lyrics that bring defiant people in foreign lands vividly to life. Curated by Friers, CATALAN! play the downright unmissable Coaster in Portrush this Friday…

  • Premiere: Dugout – Ride

    July 13, 2018 - By 

    One of several acts set to play the first ever Coaster in Portrush next Friday (July 20), Dugout are a new-fangled Belfast-based quartet whose debut single is a statement of intent. An earworming three-minute blast of Cuomo-conjuring indie-rock, the Ryan McGroarty-mixed, Rocky O’Reilly-engineered ‘Ride’ was, in the band’s own words, written about “that terrible job that we’ve all had.” Sealing the deal on the single is its video. Shot by Ciara McMullan and edited by Brendan Seamus aka BeeMickSee, it was filmed on location at Belfast venue Voodoo and features Dugout giving us a little preview of what to expect from their…

  • Track Record: A Ritual Sea

    July 17, 2018 - By 

    Donna McCabe from Dublin-based French/Irish band A Ritual Sea reveals some of her all-time records, including Benoît Pioulard, Cate Le Bon, Vangelis, Circuit des Yeux and Angel Olsen. Photos by Moira Reilly. Benoît Pioulard – Précis Benoît Pioulard is the moniker used by the American visual and music artist Thomas Meluch. Précis is an album that myself and Flo bonded over while living in two different countries and is one of the records we fell in love to. It got us through two year’s long distance, before Flo moved to Ireland. It’s full of layers of beautifully hazy music, produced with the lightest touch. It is intricate, delicate, dreamy…

  • Nazi Town, USA: Welcome to Leith’s Desperate, Unending Relevance

    July 13, 2018 - By 

    What would you do if Hitler moved in next door? Two years ago the Foyle Film Festival screened Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s documentary Welcome to Leith, a harrowing, stranger-than-fiction tale of Neo-Nazis trying to take over a tiny North Dakota town. I used to think about it about once a month. Now I think about it every day. Leith, Grant County is three square miles in size. You can fit the whole population in one train carriage. Its mayor is also the school bus driver. In 2012 it gets a new resident: a quiet, scraggy-haired older man…

  • Everything Goes: An interview with Aidan Moffat

    July 12, 2018 - By 

    Still best known as one half of Arab Strab with Malcolm Middleton, Aidan Moffat’s later career has been a multifaceted one, and his latest album, Here Lies the Body, a collaboration with RM Hubbert, is one of our favourites of 2018 so far. Ahead of July dates at Galway’s Róisín Dubh (23rd), Dublin’s Grand Social (24th) and Belfast’s Black Box (25th), Cathal McBride speaks to Aidan (pictured right, with Hubbert) about this latest project and other recent work.  Hi Aidan, how has the tour for Here Lies the Body been going so far? They’ve all been pretty great so far,…