• Irish Tracks of the Week – June 4th

    This week is one of extreme abundance across the board, with the first collaborative release from Joshua Burnside & Lemoncello’s Laura Quirke, SORBET’s debut album, Nerves, Skinner, Tuath, Hex Hue, Jake Wallace, Punching Peaches, Ciaran Lavery, Soda Blonde, VerseChorusVerse, Royal Yellow, and some cuts from a cover compilation to benefit No More Dysphoria including F.R.U.I.T.Y., Problem Patterns, Big Daisy and many more. Joshua Burnside & Laura Quirke – Taking The Wheel Laura Quirke & Joshua Burnside – Taking the Wheel by Joshua Burnside SORBET – This Was Paradise This Was Paradise by SORBET Nerves – Leigue Leigue by NERVES Tuath – That…

  • Watch: Tuath – That Looks Like A Good Spot For Some Luxury Apartments

    Fresh off the nihilism train and galvanised against unfettered capitalism and government-sanctioned mass property development, Donegal’s finest, Tuath are back with ‘That Looks Like A Good Spot For Some Luxury Apartments’, the final single from their forthcoming Research and Development EP. The band pushing the extremes and cranking tension between glossy production and pointed critique, it’s drawn from all manner of establishment-bothering works – from Adam Curtis’ culture-jamming neoliberal explorations and Mark Fisher’s theory of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ that’s been happening since around 1994, through to one of the last truly anarchic and anti-capitalist movements in music, vaporwave. The single’s accompanying satirical cover…

  • Monday Mixtape: Tebi Rex

    Just off the back of their excellent recent collaborative single with ROE, ‘Hanging With Trees’, and a slot at The Great Escape, alternative hip-hop duo Tebi Rex bring us eight eclectic choice cuts, spanning the global to their own backyard. Local Boy – Thoughts Probably the most believable Irish artist out right now. Believable in the sense that everything he creates just feels really earnest. It gets to the root of the thing that most people could spend a whole album trying to figure out. I often feel like I have Bees in my brain, and Thoughts captures that experience perfectly. It’s…

  • Shammen Delly Set To Kick Off Notions Series With AV Set

    Set to air tomorrow – Friday, May 21st – at 10pm, ‘Northern Tape Lord’ Aengus Friel, aka Shammen Delly is set to bring his hauntological blend of old VHS tapes, found-footage, reel-to-reel tape loop manipulation, ambience, trip-hop & electronic music to the very first edition of new live series Notions, broadcast from Letterkenny’s Regional Cultural Centre. The Notions series is set to feature everything from alt. rock to jazz, and aims to shine a light on Donegal artists currently pushing the boundaries in their fields to make a singular imprint on music in Ireland. Shammen Delly released his eponymous debut album in 2013, which has…

  • Monday Mixtape: Dani Larkin

    Hailing from the Armagh-Monaghan border, folk singer-songwriter Dani Larkin just released single ‘The Red (Maca’s Return)‘. Taken from her debut album, Notes For A Maiden Warrior – out June 18th – she guides us through eight songs that carry weight upon her as a songwriter and person, from the formative to the just-discovered. The Chicks – Travellin’ Soldier This was one of the first songs I used to sing. One of my uncles brought the ‘Home’ album back from the U.S. and another uncle of mine learned the guitar parts and I would sing it. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realised…

  • Irish Tracks of the Week – April 30th

    This week’s refreshingly eclectic releases include Loah’s incredible National Poetry Day release, Irish Refugee Council fundraising compilation European Endless – featuring Arvo Party, The Bonk, Fixity, Whozyerman? and more – Ghostking Is Dead, Soda Blonde, and many more. Loah – The Body to the Soul The Body to the Soul by Loah Ghostking is Dead – Biceps Biceps by Ghostking Is Dead Various Artists – European Endless European Endless: 12 by European Endless Bedrooms – Afterglow EP Afterglow by Bedrooms Ódú – Men Like Me Soda Blonde – In The Heat of the Night Small Talk by Soda Blonde Dani Larkin –…

  • Video Premiere: Pretty Happy – Sea Sea Sea

    Just a couple of months on from their hugely successful ‘Salami’, Cork art-punk trio Pretty Happy are back with the video for new single ‘Sea Sea Sea’. While the dischordant rattles of NYC no-wave-inspired guitar drive things song along, tension is cranked between shrieked vocals of bassist Arann Blake – recalling Black Francis and David Byrne at their most effervescent – and a spoken word passage from guitarist/vocalist Abbey Blake. Positively owning its Irishness, ‘Sea Sea Sea’ is an at-times dadaist exploration of the nation’s chronic self-loathing and perpetual issues of queer identity and gender stereotyping. Its video – debuted in November’s Spilt Milk Festival – was…

  • Premiere: The Bonk – Chore Loops

    The Bonk, formed some years ago by erstwhile O Emperor man Phil Christie, was conceived as an vessel by which to explore jazz, classic pop, psychedelia and garage, via loose, minimalist song structure and recursive rhythms – and across a string of our favourite Irish releases in recent years, they’ve done so with aplomb. Self-written, performed and produced by Christie himself, their new EP Chore Loops comes out tomorrow. Developing upon the kind of tension-building meditations of composers and artists like John Barry, and The Incredible String Band, it conures a feeling not unlike discovering a saloon in aspic in some bucolic future after ambling…

  • Watch: Lilac – Remember, No Regrets

    Scuzzy, unpretentious power-pop with a panache for irresistible jangle, fuzz & hooks is something that’s trickled into the water in Ireland, forming a fine cultural lineage – look no further than Good Vibrations Records and Thin Lizzy, and more recently, Pillow Queens. Trim-based sibling duo Oisín & Cian Walsh form the creative hub of Lilac, and today released their earworm of a new single ‘Remember, No Regrets’, which filters Ty Segall-esque saturated fuzz with 90s indie & psych-pop – completely self-produced in the band’s home studio. Initially set to be released pre-pandemic, they’ve pressed the record to 7″ vinyl, and it’s available…

  • EP Premiere: Poor Petal – zzz

    After a three year gestation period, Polish-born, Dublin-raised Mateusz Koznik, AKA Poor Petal has only in the last month started to drip-feed his own blend of tripped-out, yet subdued melancholic hip-hop, woozy bedroom pop and lo-fi indie rock, imbued with found sounds and homespun charm. At turns hopeful and inward-looking, debut EP zzz – written, produced & mastered by Poor Petal – horizontally floats and drifts along, picking up, peering at, and ultimately casting aside personal flotsam across its six somnambulant tracks. Mateusz told us more about its creation: “zzz took me almost 3 years to finish. Before this project I was always writing music and making beats, but I felt caged in with my inability…