• Battles Set to Return to Galway

    June 22, 2016 - By 

    Eight years on from their last show in the legendary Galway venue, it’s been announced that experimental rock powerhouse Battles will return to play Roisin Dubh on Monday, August 15. Having released their critically acclaimed third studio album La Di Da Di back in September last year via Warp Records, the New York band played a typically emphatic show at Dublin’s Button Factory back in March (check out our review/gallery here). Tickets for the band’s Roisin Dubh show go on sale this Friday at 9am priced €30/28.

  • Should We Stay Or Should We Go: An EU Referendum Playlist

    June 22, 2016 - By 

    With the all-important EU Referendum vote taking place tomorrow, we’ve sidestepped the unyielding electioneering to compile a genre-spanning Spotify playlist featuring fifty tracks – from The Fall, Amon Düül II and Galaxie 500 to Neutral Milk Hotel, Minutemen and The Velvet Underground – that we reckon some up the great continent in song.

  • Win a Workman’s Club Wellington Weekender Festival Pack

    June 21, 2016 - By 

    Featuring everything from Cian Nugent, The Greenshoe Craft Market and The Altered Hours to Black Bank Folk, Toby Kaar and Too Fools, this year’s Workman’s Club Wellington Weekender from June 24-26 is most definitely one for the calendars. To be in with a chance of winning the following festival pack for what’s set to be a great three days and nights in the Dublin venue, simply Like our Facebook page here and send a blank e-mail to info@thethinair.net with the subject “Workman’s”. A Wowburger meal for 2 on Friday 24th 4 x Wellington Weekender Cocktails on Saturday 25th A meal for 2 in…

  • Album Premiere: The Fiction Aisle – Fuchsia Days

    June 16, 2016 - By 

    Led by former Electric Soft Parade/Brakes musical polymath Thomas White, The Fiction Aisle are a Brighton-based musical collective whose second album, Fuschia Days, establishes them as a singular alt-pop force in the making. Spanning seven tracks, the album – which we’re pleased to premiere here – is a remarkably immersive release, striking a keen, almost meditatively restrained balanced between ambient, dream-pop and drone in the vein of Robert Wyatt, Broadcast and Flaming Lips‘ more symphonic efforts. With White’s monophonic Oberheim OB-1 synth at the heart of the mesmeric soundtrack-like quality of the album, it’s a wistful, beautifully-rendered journey traversing everything from true love, ecstasy and death to depression,…

  • Stream: I Am The Cosmos – Letting It Go

    June 16, 2016 - By 

    Set to launch at Dublin’s Bello Bar on July 16 , ‘Letting It Go’ sees Dublin electronic duo Ross Turner and Cian Murphy AKA I Am The Cosmos re-capture the magic that set them apart on their 2013 debut album, Monochrome. Wilfully sparse to begin, the track unwinds in typically commanding fashion, each cyclical re-iteration yielding new shades of propulsive, synth-laden magic from the pair. Set for release via Happy Valley on July 1, there’s an almost mechanical simplicity to the track that proves delightfully deceptive with repeated listens. Mastered by Simon Cullen, the single comes with b-side Taciturning On You and a re-imagining of the…

  • Premiere: Hiva Oa – A Great Height

    June 15, 2016 - By 

    Not merely the second largest island in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, Hiva Oa are a Belfast duo set to release their long-awaited new EP mk2 (part 1) on August 5. Having returned to their native Ireland after residing in Edinburgh, Stephen Houlihan and Christine Tubridy turn their attention to the laws and imprint of fear, loneliness, abandonment and awakening on the new release, something that’s impressively manifest on its lead single ‘A Great Height’. Evoking the likes of PVT, The Twilight Sad and a more inward-looking Not Squares, the track’s swirling flurry of contorting electronica, weaving bass patterns and braying guitar swells meld…

  • Watch: August Wells – She Was a Question

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    “One day you wake up, as the man that you are, And not as the one you thought you’d become. You stop making promises, you stop telling lies. You look right into your own eyes and start saying your goodbyes.” Few Irish singer-songwriters command with the same immediacy, pathos and poignance as August Wells‘ Ken Griffin. Of all their single releases to date – including the particularly excellent ‘Here In The Wild‘ – the band’s new single ‘She Was a Question’ aims straight from the psychic jugular, distilling Sisyphean acceptance to three minutes of sublimely woven, Bacharachian alt-pop where cold, hard reality simply has…

  • James Blake set for Dublin and Belfast

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    Having released his stellar third album, The Colour in Anything, last month, James Blake will kick off a UK and Ireland October/November tour with two Irish dates. Five years on from making his Irish debut at Whelan’s in March, 2011 (we’d love to say we were in attendance – alas) Blake will play Dublin”s Olympia on October 27 and make his Belfast debut on October 28. Tickets go on sale this Friday at 9am, priced €37.00/£19.50.

  • Album Premiere: Glimmermen – Breakin’ Out

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    Just last month we shared ‘Bang’, the lead single from Breakin’ Out, the new album by Dublin’s Glimmermen. Calling it a “markedly more linear yet no less distinct and ear-grabbing effort from the four-piece”, it reinforced our belief that the band – whose debut EP Satellite People caught our attention back in 2012 – had something different and potentially quite vital to their collective bow. As it so happens, Breakin’ Out confirms that fact in assured fashion, each of the release’s nine tracks threading together to form an effort where the major key and quietly emphatic cogitations on the everyday meld to…

  • Video Premiere: Alana Henderson – Song About a Song

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    Before setting off on the very long road as cellist/backing vocalist for Hozier, Dungannon singer-songwriter Alana Henderson (one of our ones to watch last year) had staked her very own captivating claim with her debut EP, Wax & Wane. Released in early 2013, it was veritable pandora’s box of burrowing folk noir, each of the release’s four traditional-tinged chamber tales bounding forth with gallant imagination and delicate, melodic finesse. With brand new material in the pipeline, ‘Song About a Song’ – a perfectly ruminating peak from Wax & Wane that’s had an incredible 5,000,000 plays on Spotify – has been resurrected with a homespun video by David Moody that wonderfully captures the song’s essence.