• Help Musicians Northern Ireland Launch Women In Music Fund

    August 1, 2018 - By 

    Help Musicians Northern Ireland have announced the launched of their Women In Music fund. Designed to “support organisations and established collectives working to promote gender equality and the role of women in music”, The fund will provide grants of between £1000 – £5000 to support projects with the aim of advancing the awareness of gender equality and diversity in music in Northern Ireland through education and skills development, support and empowerment. The fund is open to established collectives* and organisations who deliver projects that aim to: promote gender equality actively encourage greater participation of women in live music in Northern…

  • Video Premiere: Post-Punk Podge & The Technohippies – Home Is Where The Heart Bleeds

    August 3, 2018 - By 

    If you’ve been on the festival circuit this summer, you might have noticed a couple of masked, sometimes shirtless dad-bod satirists spitting fire in a nearby tent. Mangling and dragging traditional instrumentation all the way into the 21st century, Post-Punk Podge & The Technohippies are the willing, furious voice for a certain voiceless subsection of Irish people right now. Challenging Jobsbridge disillusionment, corruption at the highest levels, and the media’s compliance with that, their latest single, ‘Home Is Where The Heart Bleeds’ returns to another social issue held very dear to the act – homelessness. Oh, and the music? A heady blend of trip-hop, infused with the band’s trademark Irish Tourist…

  • Body & Soul Reveal Electric Picnic Line-Up

    July 31, 2018 - By 

    You only need to hit up the Picnic the once to know that the Body & Soul stage is probably the most rewarding corner of the annual Stradbally festival. Today, B&S organisers have let the cat out of the bag and announced their line-up for this year’s outing, which runs from August 31 to September 2. Including countless TTA favourites including Sleep Thieves, Ryan Vail, Pillow Queens,  SlowPlaceLikeHome, Bad ones, Daithi, Soulé, Paddy Hanna, O Emperor, Laoise (pictured), Hvmmingbyrd, David Keenan and more, you can check out the line-up in full below. Tickets for this year’s Electric Picnic are sold out. Photo…

  • Stream: Kyoto Love Hotel – Still

    July 31, 2018 - By 

    The project of Joe Geaney of Floating Ballroom and former Staring at Lakes member Laura Sheary, Kyoto Love Hotel, we are told, make “songs for thoughts to dance to.” An ambitious M.O. and no mistake, but having stuck their new single ‘Still’ on repeat, we can certainly see the logic. Based in Tipperary, the pair’s latest effort is a sleek trickle of electro-pop that marries low-key trap beats, twinkling synth lines and lyrics courtesy of Sheary which explore “fragmented memories and the disparities that exist between our physical reality and our interior selves.” Delve in below.

  • Watch: EHCO – Éiclips (Live)

    July 31, 2018 - By 

    Back at the start of the year, we tipped Kilcoole’s EHCO as one of our ones to watch for 2018. Headed by ex-Enemies member Eoin Whitfield, the project has hit the ground running via a handful of shows and a brace of slick singles. The most recent of those – and, by our reckoning, the band’s strongest single effort to date – ‘Éiclips‘ now comes accompanied by a new live video. Filmed on location at the Mermaid Theatre in Bray, it was created by Rosie Barrett, with audio recorded and mixed by Eóin Murphy and lighting from Conor Biddle. Catch EHCO at the Ballroom…

  • Album Stream: Kevin Nolan – Absent At the Moment When He Took Up the Most Space (Selected Recordings 1997 – 2005)

    July 31, 2018 - By 

    A selection of recordings that he made between 1997 and 2005, Absent At The Moment When He Took Up The Most Space captures the genesis and creative metamorphosis of Dublin singer, composer and author Kevin Nolan. Comprising thirty-eight tracks, taken from an archive of over 150 recordings during this period, it’s palette-spanning, at times wonderfully inspired collection of music. With many songs clocking in at such over one minute in length – often more than enough time for Nolan to strike earworming gold – Nolan approaches Robert Pollard-like levels of fecundity, all while shapeshifting between downbeat folk musings, a cappella diversions, rock-pop gems…

  • Premiere: Yawning Chasm – Awful Blue

    July 30, 2018 - By 

    The solo moniker of Galway musician and one-half of Mirakil Whip, Aaron Coyne, Yawning Chasm has drip-fed the world some wonderfully ruminative, psych-tinged dream-folk over the last few years. His new album, Songs from Blue House  follows suit, and mines twelve cloistered and candid tales by way of baritone ukulele, four-string electric mandolin, keyboard and voice. Out now on Rusted Rail, the album was mostly self-recorded during a rainstorm in a shed. The album’s lead track, ‘Awful Blue’ is a brisk, major-keyed antidote to a minor-key preoccupation. Have a first peek at its suitably low-key visuals below. Stream/buy Songs From Blue House here.

  • Watch: Fears – Blood

    July 31, 2018 - By 

    From her immersive live shows to recent single ‘h_always‘, Constance Keane, AKA Fears, has grown to become one of Ireland’s foremost creators of ambitious, subtle pop. Her latest in a recent string of audio-visual collaborations revisits her stark, somnambulist 2016 single ‘Blood‘, which has now too met its warped match with the help of director Aodh. ‘Blood’ stars Mark Loughran as father and IFTA-nominated young actor Dafhyd Flynn from award-winning Irish 2017 film Michael Inside as son. Thanks in no small part to the to contrasting camera work from Matthew Rogan & lo-fi footage by Cloda Farrelly, the video is eye-wateringly evocative in its portrayal of the complexities…

  • Premiere: Hot Cops – Decay

    July 27, 2018 - By 

    On Monday (July 30), Belfast indie rock stalwarts Hot Cops will release Speed Dating, a five-track EP that compiles remastered versions of their singles to date. Doubling up as a quick primer of-sorts, the release holds up as an all-killer insight into why the Carl Eccles-fronted band are widely considered to be one of the country’s very best (a theory you may have noticed we’ve shared over the last few years.) The release’s lead track, ‘Decay’ has long been a live highlight for the band. A three-minute blast of fuzzed-out slacker-pop, it’s a full-blown celebration of ennui that finds relief in both simple admittance and its feedback-soaked closing…

  • Premiere: Oisin O’Scolai & The Virginia Slims – Join Me in The Ground

    July 27, 2018 - By 

    Hailing from Donegal, Derry-based artist Oisin O’Scolai is most certainly one to watch. Very accurately being dubbed by his label, Belfast’s Black Tragick Records, as “the Buncrana Beck” (alternatively “if Harry Nilsson was from Donegal” or a latter day Paul Westerberg if he hadn’t have got drunk with the Stinson brothers and started The Replacements”). Self-recorded and released as Oisin O’Scolai and the Virginia Slims, the stellar, slow-burning gothic-folk of ‘Join Me in the Ground’ was mixed Ben McAuley and sees O’Scolai wield subtlety and pathos like a scythe. Taken from his forthcoming debut album, Vacant Sea, the single comes yet more…