• Young Hearts Run Free present Yule! (11)

    November 13, 2019 - By 

    Commemorating the tenth annual outing for Young Hearts Run Free’s annual Xmas fundraising drive for the Simon Community, Yule! (11) will unite some of the country’s finest acts this year on Saturday, December 7th. Running from 7pm to 2am at Dallymount Park in Phibsborough, the event will feature sets from Dónal Lunny, Aoife Nessa Frances, a Scott Walker tribute supergroup, Badhands, Rachael Lavelle, Mother Tongues, Cian Ó’Cíobháin, Natalya O’Flaherty, Tandem Felix, and Paddy Hanna, with more to be confirmed, as well as special surprise guests. Tickets range from Follow €20.07 – €27.55 and can be bought here. Endlessly recommended.

  • Quarter Block Party 2020 Announced

    November 13, 2019 - By 

    Another year, another stellar first wave announcement for Cork’s Quarter Block Party. Returning for its sixth edition from February 6-9th, the music and performing arts festival have revealed some of the acts who’ll be making an appearance at various venues across the city. Best of all, it’s full of some straight-up TTA favourites: The Bonk, Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies, Maija Sofia, Lemoncello (pictured), Elaine Howley, Aoife Nessa Frances, God Alone, Melts, Jar Jar Jr., Pretty Happy and Soft Focus. Festival manager Caoilian Sherlock commented: “We are delighted to bring the sixth edition of Quarter Block Party to Cork this…

  • NI Music Prize Winners Announced

    November 11, 2019 - By 

    The winner at this year’s Northern Ireland Music Prize has been announced. Taking place at Belfast’s Ulster on Thursday night, the annual ceremony saw Eoin O’Callaghan Elma Orkestra & Ryan Vail walk away with the main Best Album prize for their collaborative Borders release. As well as performances from Strange New Places, Jordan Adetunji, Saint Sister, O’Callaghan & Vail and Oh Yeah Legends Award recipients Snow Patrol, Sister Ghost walked away with Best Live Act, Cherym won the Oh Yeah Contender Award and Junk Drawer took Best Single with ‘Year of the Sofa’. Meanwhile, X-ray Touring’s Steve Strange won the Outstanding Contribution to…

  • Stream: Hales Lake – Pro-Strife

    November 11, 2019 - By 

    Comprising Shane Crosson, Girlfriend’s Sophie Dunne, Jamie O’Suiligh and Ryan McClelland, Hales Lake have played a string of stellar shows in Dublin, Belfast and Limerick this year. Impassioned and curveballing, the have been sets introducing a quartet who, right off the bat, are staking a claim with a sound melding alternative and emo with ‘gazey textures and a fist-clenched noise-rock sensibility. Look no further than debut single, ‘Pro-Strife’, which you can stream below. Speaking about the track, the band offered up the mini-manifesto of sorts, reflecting on how cross-country issues has helped bolster island-wide solidarity in the creative community of which…

  • Richard Dawson Set For Dublin and Belfast

    November 6, 2019 - By 

    Hands down one of the greatest songwriters alive today, Richard Dawson will return to play a couple of Irish shows in 2020. With his band in tow, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne artist will play Belfast Empire Music Hall on February 20 and Whelan’s in Dublin on February 21. Tickets are priced at £17.50 and €18.95 respectively.

  • Album Premiere: Jogging – Whole Heart

    October 31, 2019 - By 

    We’ve premiered our fair share of albums here on The Thin Air, but – if truth be told – we’re struggling to recall one that we’ve loved so much, and so quickly, as Whole Heart by Dublin three-piece Jogging. The long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s Take Courage, it’s an emphatic (and rather heavier) ten-track return from Darren Craig, Gerard Mangan and Ronan Jackson. Out today via one of the country’s finest imprints, Out On a Limb, the album was engineered and produced by John “Spud” Murphy and Ian Chestnutt at Guerrilla Sound Studios in Dublin at the start of the year. To mark…

  • Sun Kil Moon To Play Dublin and Bangor

    October 30, 2019 - By 

    Mark Kozelek aka Sun Kil Moon will play Dublin and Bangor next year. The Californian artist, who is also a founding member of Red House Painters, will play a fully-seated show at Dublin’s Liberty Hall Theatre on Saturday, May 23 and Bangor’s Wesley Centenary Church on Friday, May 22 2020. Tickets cost €29.50 and £30 respectively and go on sale at 9am this Friday from here and here.

  • Watch: Shrug Life – You’re Such a Good Looking Woman

    October 29, 2019 - By 

    It’s true. Indeed, it’s positively ironclad: there is no show like a Joe show, but Shrug Life, we reckon, give him a run for his money. Yes, Dublin’s most incisive and impossibly earworming indie-leaning trio are back with a cover of ‘You’re Such a Good Looking Woman’, the Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood-penned song that the one, the only Joseph Francis Robert “Joe” Dolan made his own back in 1970. Now, I know what you’re thinking: on paper, this probably shouldn’t work. But we’re not talking about paper here, are we? No – we are referring, in fact, to the medium of song.…

  • Wanda: Feminism and Moving Image

    October 29, 2019 - By 

    Belfast’s feminist film festival, WANDA: Feminism & Moving Image, returns for its second outing later this week. Opening on Thursday, October 31st and running until Sunday, November 3, the festival have pulled out the stops to present a wonderfully diverse programme, spanning new and retrospective films and features directed by women. Launching at Queen’s Film Theatre with The Juniper Tree, this year’s programme features, among many other screenings, discussions and panels across the city, the NI premiere of Kim Longinotto’s critically-acclaimed Irish-produced documentary Shooting the Mafia. Co-director Rose Baker said, “As the festival’s key aim is to revisit ‘lost’ films by…

  • Premiere: Laurie Shaw – Had To Swerve

    October 29, 2019 - By 

    This Thursday, endlessly prolific, Cork-based songwriter Laurie Shaw will release his latest album, Helvetica. The follow-up to the exquisite Weird Weekends (which we premiered last January) the redord, we’re told, “delves deep into the British psyche, taking a poignant and timely look at its history and current society, moving between both fond and satirical tones.” New single ‘Had To Swerve’ edges into more darkly territory. Conjuring a midpoint between Sparklehorse, Department of Eagles and Amnesiac-era Radiohead, it makes for a brilliantly oppressive four-minute burst of scorched vocals and layered, spectral sounds. Have a first look at the Laurie Shaw-directed video for the single, as…