• And So I Watch You From Afar – Jettison

    April 7, 2022 - By 

    After five albums, And So I Watch You From Afar take something of a left turn with their first ‘multimedia album’ Jettison. Produced with accompanying visuals, their usual crushing riffs and frenzied guitar workouts are replaced, at least initially, by gentle chords resembling The Cinematic Orchestra’s ‘To Build a Home’. Strings and spoken word passages from Emma Ruth Rundle and Clutch’s Neil Fallon float in and out, adding new dimensions to the beloved Belfast-based band’s sound The tension racks up though as the album continues, each movement seamlessly progressing into the next as one long continuous piece, at times recalling…

  • NewDad – Banshee

    March 8, 2022 - By 

    Young Galway quartet NewDad hit the ground running with the release of their debut EP Waves in early 2021. Its fresh take on hypnotic dream pop and shoegaze sounds captured the hearts and minds of listeners and critics alike. On their follow-up, Banshee, NewDad have kept that momentum going, accelerating toward a dazzling future. Recorded in Belfast and mixed by John Cogleton (Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers), Banshee sees NewDad dig deeper into their sound, resurfacing with a handful of tracks that see them at their most daring, intense and captivating. Opener ‘Say It’, arguably the band’s most radio-friendly track…

  • Earl Sweatshirt – Sick!

    February 8, 2022 - By 

    Penned as a reflection on the world’s weakened mental condition amid the pandemic, and the heightened anger and isolation that came with the near universal inertia and entropy, Sick! is former Odd Future member Earl Sweatshirt’s fourth LP, arriving two years after his FEET OF CLAY EP and almost four years after his last full-length, Some Rap Songs.  With 10 tracks at a running time of just 24 minutes, the album is instantly comparable to its predecessor in terms of its pace. However, where Some Rap Songs is a murky, scattered aural journey, Sick! is comparatively smooth sailing. Sure, the wonky, glitchy…

  • M(h)aol – Gender Studies

    January 18, 2022 - By 

    M(h)aol’s intersectional feminist punk fury first entered public consciousness in 2016 with the release of their debut single ‘Clementine’. The song, inspired by Clementine Churchill’s anonymous 1913 letter to the Times in response to anti-suffrage campaigner Almost Wright, saw vocalist Roisin Nic Ghearailt’s flit seamlessly from a heavily affected robotic drone to a passionate wail, pitted against a guest vocal from Gilla Band’s Dara Kiely and murky, industrial guitar scratches. The band were rightly tipped for big things at this early stage. Then, there was nothing. Five years passed between ‘Clementine’ and its 2021 follow-up, ‘Laundries’, a reflection on one…

  • Ordnance Survey – Field Work

    December 22, 2021 - By 

    Outside of his work on keys and percussion for Dublin math-rock heroes The Redneck Manifesto and stints playing with Jape and David Kitt, Neil O’Connor has been quietly plugging away for years as one of Ireland’s finest electronic musicians and composers. While his Somadrone project started out in the realm of twitchy electronics and ambient vibraphone textures on early albums like Fuzzing Away to a Whisper, over the years it’s become more a fleshed out beast, adding weary vocals and occasional guitar on top of ice cold synths, like an intriguing blend of shoegaze and house. While we haven’t had…

  • Elaine Mai – Home

    November 15, 2021 - By 

    The title of Elaine Mai’s long-awaited debut album, Home, holds a lot of weight. Living through a pandemic changed the way we understand the meaning of the word, with many people left to create their own sense of home with what they had. For Mai, who has been an active figure in the Irish music scene for 10 years now, these nine tracks feel like a homecoming in themselves. Inviting a host of female collaborators to contribute to the album, this record further solidifies Mai’s esteemed place within the scene, and the home she has found within it. Home’s arrangements…

  • The Altered Hours – Convertible

    November 1, 2021 - By 

    Given that they’ve been releasing music for a full decade now, it’s easy to forget that Cork quintet The Altered Hours are only now releasing their second full length album, Convertible. It must be down to the quality of the EPs they’ve released along the way – no mere stopgaps, releases like 2013’s Sweet Jelly Roll or 2018’s On My Tongue house so much of their most essential material. Debut long player In Heat Not Sorry surfaced in 2016 – an excellent collection of tracks, but one that often took a slower and starker direction than previous releases in a…

  • Deafheaven – Infinite Granite

    September 1, 2021 - By 

    One could argue that Deafheaven are to so-called “blackgaze” music what the Sex Pistols were to punk rock: they weren’t the first on the scene, but the genre would be nothing without their influence. Black metal has incorporated atmospheric overtones since the early-to-mid-‘90s through the work of notorious acts like Mayhem and especially Burzum, and later groups such as Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room and Ireland’s own Altar of Plagues. Contemporary acts expanded upon the shoegaze Wall of Sound that tremolo picked guitars offered to include strings, synths and melodic passages, with Frenchman Neige being credited with providing the…

  • Horsey – Debonair

    August 18, 2021 - By 

    It was already evident from their slow drip of sporadic singles over the last five years that Horsey were a band lacking neither in ambition or invention, even if the inclination to get a record out seems not to have been a pressing concern. Their debut album, Debonair, is a little over 30 minutes long but within that span is a carnival cast of gonzo characters and leftfield sojourns.  The standard verse-chorus-bridge formula is accounted for, sure enough, but  what transpires between the first few seconds of a song and where it eventually winds up is anybody’s guess. If Jim Steinman…

  • The Cube of Unknowing – Drowned Zones

    August 9, 2021 - By 

    After tackling small town esoterica and early Irish Christianity, the latest release by Francis Heery, aka The Cube of Unknowing, explores the idea of resurgent nature, unleashed by a world-changing flood, engulfing the towns of County Galway. Drowned Zones is made up of six glimpses into a future past, where small town ruins are overtaken by jungle and stalked by creatures only a new primordial soup could conjure. The most resonant sci-fi charts the consequences of choices made in the present, so it is little surprise that Heery’s album description references dystopian chronicler JG Ballard. The concept, from artwork to…