• Stream: Ciaran Lavery – New Partner (Bonnie Prince Billy Cover)

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    With Record Store Day 2017 next Saturday fast approaching, Aghagallon artist Ciaran Lavery is primed to to release his own contribution in the form of A King at Night, an EP featuring covers of Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs. The lead single from that, ‘New Partner’ – which featured on BPB AKA Will Oldham’s 1995 album as Palace Music, Viva Last Blues – makes for an exquisite, wonderfully reflective rendition, where swooning streaks of string, lush harmonies and Lavery’s impeccable vocal delivery marry in very impressive fashion.

  • Another Love Story Reveal Initial Line-Up

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    Easily our favourite small Irish summer festival, Another Love Story returns to the sublime Killyon Manor in Co. Meath from Friday August 18 to Sunday, August 20. With more acts set to unveiled, organisers Happenings and Homebeat have revealed their initial line-up of live acts and DJs including Katie Kim, Overhead The Albatross, JFDR, This Is How We Fly, I Am The Cosmos, Bantum, ELLLL (pictured), The Another Love Story Soundsystem, Bodytonic DJS, The Thin Air DJs, a very special guest and much more. Here’s the initial line-up in full: Due to unprecedented early demand, the festival is current on its last tier of…

  • Stream: Pat Dam Smyth – Juliette

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    Ask a selection of the country’s most well-regarded and successful singer-songwriters who their own favourite Irish songsmith is and there’s a very strong chance that Pat Dam Smyth will crop up. An artist whose candour, lyricism and musicianship leaves affectation and hubris at the door, his long-awaited new single ‘Juliette’ is a masterfully mournful cut, concisely relaying the tale of a woman attempting to escape an abusive relationship. Cut from the same cloth of Nick Cave and John Grant, the full-band effort also conjures Dark Side-era Pink Floyd in its braying brass and portentous, swaggering pop élan. The first single to be taken from…

  • Twin Peaks Fest Belfast

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    To mark the show’s monumentally-anticipated return after 25 years next month, Twin Peaks Fest Belfast will take place at The National across May 20-21. Promising screenings, fancy dress, Miss Twin Peaks Pageant, a Lynchian music night, prizes and more to be announced, tickets for the festival can snapped here for such £11.00 including booking fee. Damn fine, etc. As is this poster for the festival courtesy of Belfast’s Kubrix Design.

  • Festival Mixtape: Body & Soul 2017

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    We say it pretty much every year but the line-up for this year’s Body & Soul is a thing of beauty. Returning to Clonmellon, Co. Westmeath across June 23-25, the festival will host everyone from Sleaford Mods, Austra and Metronomy to Mykki Blanco, Songhoy Blues and The Moonlandingz. With organisers opting, as ever, for sheer quality over any notion of genre-specific necessity, we’re looking forward to joining the thousands who’ll descend upon Ballinlough Castle this Summer Solstice Weekend. But first? Here’s our annual Body & Soul Festival Mixtape, featuring twenty acts we won’t be missing for anything.

  • Mons Olympus Announce Debut Album

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    Having recently played a Thin Air Tuesday Throwdown at Lavery’s in Belfast, Northern Irish quartet Mons Olympus have announced details of their forthcoming debut album. Produced by their guitarist Stephen O’Hagan and Nathan Murray, (minus single ‘Critical Mass’, which was recorded by Michael Mormecha) the eight-track Vampyroteuthis will be launched and officially released at Belfast Empire Music Hall on May 4. Blending the Rory Dee-fronted foursome’s potent amalgalm of space-rock and neo-prog, it’s sure to establish the band as one of the country’s leading exponents of cosmically-inclined, riff-fuelled alternative rock. With more shows to be announced, Mons Olympus will play the following…

  • Premiere: Cat Palace – Don’t Come Around

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    Last month we had the distinct pleasure of premiering ‘Peddle It’ by Cat Palace, a Dublin act with one David Blaney at the helm. Set to release their debut album Why Don’t You // Why Don’t You, Go Off on Monday, new single ‘Don’t Come Around’ is a reflective, two-minute flicker of throwback garage-rock that sees Blaney waxing delirious on backwashed memories of youth, from WWF to Donkey Kong, and later, the dregs of friendship when it goes little pear-shaped (like, totally, man) heading into adulthood. Cat Palace play alongside Junk Drawer, Autre Monde and Oh Joy at Tivoli Backstage in Dublin on April 21. Have…

  • Watch: Final Boss of My Twenties – Let Go

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    As Irish music-making monikers go, Final Boss of My Twenties is right up there with the most inspired. The sonic sobriquet (yes, we went there) of twenty-eight year old Dubliner Simon Maguire, the turn of phrase has very recently come to our attention off the back of Murphy latest single, ‘Let Go’. Featuring a rather impressive, Lego-based video – the product of “weeks of moving these little guys millimetres at a time”) – the single is a pretty contemplative affair, and what Maguire calls the “culmination of an ounce of action and a ton of theory; now the seed’s finally in the soil, I’d…

  • Stream: Isobel Anderson – Flint Shingle

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    A compelling highlight from her recent live shows, ‘Flint Shingle’ by Belfast-based artist Isobel Anderson is a wonderfully meditative song inspired by the jagged cliffs of her childhood in South East England. The first single to be taken from her fourth studio album, CHALK/FLINT, the track – a “self-proclaimed symphony to the sea” – is a delicately textured, perfectly phantasmal ambient effort written in her birthplace of Sussex and recorded in Belfast. Anderson said, “It is sort of a love song, if only with a nostalgic, almost regretful, sentiment. The idea is that the landscape acts as a sort of sobering force, a marker of…

  • Moira Calling Reveal Main Stage Acts

    April 6, 2017 - By 

    Arguably Northern Ireland’s most promising new small festival outside of Belfast, Moira Calling have unveiled the acts set to the play the Main Stage when it returns for its second outing later this year. Taking place in the the Co. Armagh village across September 8-9, Eliza and the Bear, Flyte, Emerald Armada, Girls Names (pictured), Stomptown Brass, Brand New Friend and Franklyn will all appear at the Main Stage on the 9th. Organiser Jillian Marsden of promoters Brown Lemonade said, “Last year when we started this we could never have imagined being here a year later, with a full-blown music festival and a host of…