• 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…

  • John Francis Flynn – I Would Not Live Always

    July 30, 2021 - By 

    While Ireland’s contemporary folk scene continues to go from strength to strength, London label Rough Trade must take some credit for bringing it to a wider audience beyond these shores. As well as releasing the past two Lankum albums on their main label, their burgeoning folk imprint River Lea has debuted with records by both Lisa O’Neill and Ye Vagabonds, and now brings us I Would Not Live Always, the debut from John Francis Flynn.  Flynn has been a longtime member of Dublin five piece Skipper’s Alley, with whom he’s already released two albums of traditional covers, but his more…

  • Eimear Reidy and Natalia Beylis – Whose Woods These Are

    July 6, 2021 - By 

    If day trip destinations and social media posts are accepted as a metric, most Irish people view forests as a good thing. But excepting the few lucky enough to live beside one, they are largely a box to tick on the summer to-do list. While beloved for their soul-refreshing qualities, much of the population does not have an everyday relationship with them. This is not surprising, given that government mismanagement has made the arboreal a remote presence. Ireland has the least woodland of any country in Europe, a miserable 11% coverage compared to an European average over 40%. Such disheartening…

  • KMRU – Logue

    June 29, 2021 - By 

    Nairobi-born, Berlin-based KMRU’s Logue is a collection of ambient snapshots, compiling previously self-released individual pieces that chart his journey to date, and his rising prominence in the world of experimental electronic music. Where his three albums released in 2020,Peel, Jar and Opaquer, were cohesive, flowing works, the stitches in Logue are cut loose due to its loosely assembled nature. Nonetheless, it is an album of shining moments, thrilling ambience and transportive field recordings.  Following the legacy of his famed Kikuyu Benga musician grandfather, music is in KMRU’s blood. The 24-year-old artist, however, opts for a less traditional route. Teaching himself FL Studio while…