• Premiere: Slyrydes – Mental Health

    March 1, 2019 - By 

    We’re pleased to present a first look at the video for the debut single from Galway band Slyrydes. A self-proclaimed “frank take on the shambolic Irish Health Service”, ‘Mental Health’ is a potent and necessary first offering from the quartet. It’s something the video, which you can view below, taps into to and then some. This is vital music from a band we’re sure are destined for big things in 2019 and beyond. Slyrydes play Galway’s Roisin Dubh on March 23 and Dublin’s Grand Social on March 29.

  • A Turn Up For The Book: An Interview with VerseChorusVerse

    February 27, 2019 - By 

    Last year, Belfast-based, North Coast musician and singer-songwriter Tony Wright aka VerseChorusVerse took the leap. It’s one that few musicians ever get around to but for some, Wright including, writing about his life seemed to stem from a kind of cosmic duty; as a means to both memorialise and give literary content to a remarkable life lived. Luckily, it seems that Tony Wright, despite everything, is only getting started. To call Chapter & Verse(ChorusVerse) a page-turner would be doing it a disservice. As anyone who has delved into the author’s music – or caught him live – can attest, he’s every bit the born fabulist. Recounting…

  • Kate Tempest and Princess Nokia Among First Names Announced for Body & Soul

    February 26, 2019 - By 

    Kate Tempest and Princess Nokia are among the first names announced to play this year’s Body & Soul. Returning to Ballinlough Castle in Co. Westmeath across June 21-23, the annual Irish summer festival will also play host to The Blaze, Talos, SOAK, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Dream Wife, Modeselektor, Coely and Kiddy Smile, Santi Gold, Baikal, Monolink, The Drifer, Oshun, Mano Le Tough, Wyvern Lingo, Laoise, Tulla Céilí Band, whenyoung, The Murder Capital, Meltybrains?, Thumper, Niamh Regan, Lil’ Dave and The Clockworks. The first announcement was made in the Big Romance in Dublin this evening. Many more acts are to be announced. Tickets…

  • Watch: Robyn G Shiels – Black Moon (Arvo Party Remix)

    February 26, 2019 - By 

    Taken from one of the Irish releases of last year, the five-track Death of the Shadows, ‘Black Moon’ found Kilrea singer-songwriter Robyn G Shiels‘ funereal folk craft stripped back to a plaintive, five-minute ode. It was a fitting curtain call for an EP that doubly confirmed the Belfast-based musician as one of the most incisive songwriting voices around. Three months on, Herb Magee aka Arvo Party has given the song the remix treatment. And how it comes off: leaning into the innate spaciousness and yearnful quality of the original, Magee’s inspired washes of ambience and decay reveal a whole new character to Shiels’…

  • Massive Attack @ 3Arena, Dublin

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    When Massive Attack announced their current Mezzanine XXI tour last October, no one could have reasonably expected a safe or linear presentation of the band’s seminal – and arguably career-cresting – 1998 album. With founding member Robert Del Naja aka 3D promising a “one-off piece of work; our own personalised nostalgia nightmare head trip”, at Dublin’s 3Arena tonight, the Bristol luminaries deliver on that pledge and then some. Unless you’ve been keeping a close eye on recent setlists, the big curveball of tonight’s set isn’t the top-drawer guest vocalists (in this case, Horace Andy and the ever extraordinary Elizabeth Frazer).…

  • Stream: Swimmers Jackson – Believe

    February 28, 2019 - By 

    A jack of all trades and master of many, London-based Dubliner Niall Jackson is right up there as one of the hardest-working Irish musicians you’re ever likely to come across. Beyond being a member of indie-rock quartet Bouts (who have just released quite possibly the Irish album of the year thus far) and post-punk duo Sweat Threats, he’s also been drip-feeding the world some stellar sounds in his solo guise, Swimmers Jackson, since 2013. New single ‘Believe’ is one of his most emphatic efforts to date. A candid and carefully-crafted tale, it doubles up as something of an extension of last year’s ‘Pain In the Heart’.…

  • Premiere: Joshua Burnside – The Good Word (Live at the Elmwood Hall)

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    Northern Irish alt-folk trailblazer Joshua Burnside has announced the release of a new album, Live at the Elmwood Hall. Recorded at Belfast’s historic Elmwood Hall, as part of Quiet Arch’s fourth birthday in December 2018, it’s release that reveals the full spectrum of Burnside’s emphatic craft. Featuring reworked, full-band arrangements of tracks handpicked from his Northern Irish Music Prize-winning album, EPHRATA, as well as EPs Hollllogram and All Round the Light Said, it captures a set that leaps between intimate and raw, to full-blown and celebratory. Speaking about the album, Burnside said, “It’s quite strange listening to it back in way, like…

  • Stereolab Set For Irish Shows

    February 20, 2019 - By 

    Re-emerging English-French avant-pop heroes Stereolab have announce two Irish shows. Having went on hiatus in 2009, the band will return to play a series of dates in 2019, including Belfast’s Empire Music Hall on June 24 and Vicar Street in Dublin on June 25. Tickets go on sale at 9am on Friday.

  • Stream: Slouch – Day Half

    February 20, 2019 - By 

    We’ve been singing the praises of Slouch to anyone who will listen for an age now. Comprising guitarist and vocalist Conor Wilson, bassist Kev Shannon and drummer Malachy Burke, the Dublin trio’s shapeshifting, scuzzed-out sounds defy easy categorisation more than the vast majority of Irish bands all-too-swiftly referred to “alt-rock”. In truth, Slouch have also felt like a genuine alternative – a riff-wielding, face-searing, psychogroove-pedalling flipside – in a scene heavily saturated with FM-flirting, Award-Winning-Music-Blogger-appeasing guitar rock. The lead single from their forthcoming “very nearly finished” debut album, ‘Day Half’ sublimates the very best aspects of Slouch’s craft to five masterfully unpredictable minutes. Marrying dizzying riff…

  • 19 for ’19: Strange New Places

    February 18, 2019 - By 

    We continue 19 for ‘19 – our feature looking at nineteen Irish acts that we’re convinced are going places in 2019 – with fast-rising Belfast queerpunk five-piece Strange New Places. Photo by Niall Fegan One of several fast-rising Northern Irish acts that have been propelled by the Scratch My Progress initiative at Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre, Strange New Places spent 2018 steadily emerging as one of the country’s most promising bands. On full display at Outburst’s Youth Take Over Day, Atlantic Sessions, Women’s Work festival and elsewhere throughout the year was the band’s equal parts forward-pushing and ear-worming brand of queerpunk. Striking strong…