• Album stream: Interpol – El Pintor

    Set for release on September 9, Interpol are streaming their highly-anticipated fifth studio album, El Pintor. You can stream the album in full over at NPR and buy tickets to see the band play Dublin on February 10 and 11 via Ticketmaster here. Missed it? Watch the band’s recent video for ‘All The Rage Back Home’ below.

  • Electric Picnic reveal Main Stage times

    With only three days left until this year’s (comprehensively sold-out) installment of the annual Stradbally Estate, Co. Laois festival, Main Stage times have been announced for Electric Picnic. Times have also been announced for the Red Bull Music Academy and Casa Bacardi stages. Check them out them out below. Main Stage Friday 10.45pm-12am: Pet Shop Boys 9pm-10.15pm: Foals 7.15pm-8.15pm: Blondie 6pm-6.45pm: The Strypes 5pm-5.30pm: Tvvins Saturday 12.30am-1.45am: Chic 10.35pm-11.50pm: Portishead 8.45pm-9.55pm: Paolo Nutini 7pm-8.05pm: Bombay Bicycle Club 5.30pm-6.25pm: Hozier 3.45pm-4.45pm: Wild Beasts 2pm-3pm: The Stranglers 12.30pm-1.30pm: Trinity Orchestra Sunday 10.15pm-12am: Outkast 8.30pm-9.45pm: Beck 7pm-8pm: Lily Allen 5.25pm-6.25pm: SimpleMinds 3.50pm-4.50pm: Sinead…

  • First acts announced for Samhain Festival 2014

    Having sold out last year, Samhain Festival has announced the first few acts set to play its next outing in a couple of months. Taking the stunning Loughcrew Gardens in Co. Meath on Sunday, October 26, the annual showcase will see the final Irish date on Jon Hopkins’ (pictured) Immunity tour, as well as appearances from John Talabot, the fast-rising Maya Jane Coles, Booka Shade (Live) and Detroit veteran Jimmy Edgar. More acts are to be announced. According to the festival, the new location is “shadowed by Sliabh na Caillíagh, the “Witch’s Mountain”, bordered by 300 year old Yew trees, grown to…

  • Jeremy Thomas: The Auteur Producer @ QFT

    Belfast’s Queens Film Theatre will host a special, one-off talk with groundbreaking English film producer Jeremy Thomas on Thursday, August 21. For four decades, Thomas (pictured, right, with Bernardo Bertolucci on the set of the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor) has been behind some of British cinema’s most ambitious and exciting films, working with a host of legendary directors including Nicolas Roeg, David Cronenberg and the aforementioned Italian auteur. The QFT talk is set to be a look back at highlights from a career packed with films of artistic merit, ambition and originality. Things kick off at 7.30pm and you can buy…

  • Watch: UNKNWN – BBY

    Bound for Electric Picnic at the end of the month, Champion Sound-signed electronic duo UNKNWN have unveiled their debut music video, for the track ‘BBY’. Directed by Daniel Holmes, it is a nicely edited, suitably phantasmal affair, wonderfully accompanying the track’s hazy, drifting air. ‘BBY’ is taken from the duo’s DEVIL/BBY EP, which you purchase right here. UNKNWN – comprised of producer Chris Hanna and vocalist Gemma Dunleavy – have steadily grown in stature and acclaim over the last few months, something that will come into sharp focus when they play alongside labelmates Ryan Vail, Contour, Ghosts, Talkboy and Replete at the Body & Soul tent at…

  • Video premiere: The North Sea – In Love

    The first track to be taken from their as-of-yet unnamed debut album, Dublin alt-rock five-piece The North Sea will release ‘In Love’ on September 26 – and we’ve the first look of the single’s video. Shot by Second Frame and directed by Niall Conroy and Daniel Kennedy, it’s a nicely-lit, monochrome affair, perfectly capture the song’s slick, darkly tangents, reminiscent of the likes of Interpol and Editors. The follow-up to their promising, 2012 self-titled EP, the band’s forthcoming album was recorded live to tape in order to capture their live sound, and was produced by Grammy Award-winning Irish producer David Odlum…

  • A Brief History of Post-Rock

    Of the countless genre names that describe modern music, post-rock is probably the vaguest of those widely used. Open to generalisation, uncertainty and blind exaggeration, it has no commonly accepted definition and many acts including Tortoise and Mogwai have distanced themselves from the term. That said, much like postmodernism or the avant-garde, there remains a general consensus about the development and essential traits central to this most ambiguous of labels, currently used to describe the likes of This Will Destroy You, Mono and our very own Adebisi Shank, And So I Watch You From Afar, etc. Brian Coney attempts to trace…

  • Festival Mixtape: Hard Working Class Heroes 2014

    Yesterday, 100+ acts were announced to playing Hard Working Class Heroes, hands down the country’s finest annual showcase of emerging, independent, homegrown talent. Spanning dozens of genres, the festival – taking place across Dublin from October 2-4 – is set to be a downright unmissable three-day event. Check out our twenty-track, decidedly eclectic Festival Mixtape for HWCH below via Spotify.

  • Bangor set for Open House Festival Culture Day

    A main fixture of this year’s Open House Festival, the streets of Bangor will be transformed into a bustling hub of happenings and creative activity for Culture Day on Saturday, August 23. Celebrating the wealth of creative talent of the town, buskers, skateboarders, poets, potterers, dancers and dramatists will see every corner of the Co. Down seaside resort come alive with an eruption of sound, movement and colour. Speaking of Culture Day 2014, Open House Festival Director, Kieran Gilmore said, “It’s a well-known fact that Bangor folk are a talented breed. Over the years the town has produced an abundance…

  • “We Are…” by Diarmuid Kennedy

    Whether you’ve encountered him or not – and chances are many of you have – self-professed “unprofessional photographer” Diarmuid Kennedy has been a veritable fly-on-the-wall of Belfast music over the last couple of years. A masterfully discreet operator, he is often one of a small handful at people to brave line-ups of all-but anonymous debutantes and furtive young musicians; his photography – just like his work capturing bigger, more established local bills – providing a priceless insight into an ever-evolving, somewhat maligned but, for the most part, consistently impressive music scene. Sitting outside the Pavilion Bar on Ormeau Road – a venue in which the photographer has shot innumerable up-and-coming bands…