• Orville Peck – Show Pony

    September 1, 2020 - By 

    Bedecked in a Stetson hat, a Roy Rogers Nudie Suit and enough rhinestones and country verve to power the Dollywood Ferris wheel, enigmatic troubadour Orville Peck’s star has been on a steady rise since first ten-stepping his way onto the world stage back in 2019. His acclaimed debut album Pony marked Peck out as an important new songwriter in country music, showcasing not only his unique style and towering vocal chops but also a seemingly endless array of face obscuring leather fringed masks, a stylish nod to anonymity that has since become his calling card.  Melding the macho “outlaw country”…

  • Angel Olsen – Whole New Mess 

    August 28, 2020 - By 

    The songs on Angel Olsen’s new album should not, we are told, be considered to be merely a collection of demos. Nine of the eleven tracks on Whole New Mess already appeared on last year’s All Mirrors record, albeit in a more fleshed out form, and then some. For that album Olsen teamed up with orchestral composer Jherek Bischoff, arranger Ben Babbit, and an expanded band to deliver a feast of synths, strings and horns, all topped off with some of Asheville, North Carolina-based artist’s most commanding vocal performances to date. While unavoidably similar, Whole New Mess, is a very…

  • Fontaines D.C. – A Hero’s Death

    August 26, 2020 - By 

    Veteran YouTuber and renowned online personality Tom Scott has an interesting point about the double-edged sword of Internet virality. He posits that if you want to be a successful content creator, then a viral smash hit at an early point in your journey can derail you just as you’re leaving the station. His argument fundamentally rests on the belief that most artists and creators don’t have a clear enough idea of who they are, or what exactly it is they want to say, at that early stage. It’s better, he believes, to spend time honing your craft and developing a distinct identity, rather…

  • Brién – DIY VOL. 1

    August 26, 2020 - By 

      You wouldn’t want to put money on what’s going to drop next from the ever-reliable Soft Boy Records. Whether it’s creating a platform for groundbreaking Irish hip hop (Kojaque) or injecting new life into Dublin jazz (Five to Two), the collective has quickly established itself as a bastion of progressive and forward-thinking homegrown music, with each release offering something genuinely new.  DIY VOL. 1 from Belfast-based multi-instrumentalist Brién is no exception. Encompassing hip hop, jazzy broken beat and R&B in its short run-time, Brién’s latest offering encapsulates the very essence of Soft Boy Records into one, easily-digestible amuse-bouche of…

  • MuRli – Till The Wheels Fall Off

    August 25, 2020 - By 

    MuRli is an Irish music renaissance man. The Limerick rapper, producer and singer has stamped his mark on the Irish scene over the past half decade as part of Choice Music Prize winning  trio Rusangano Family and through a string of striking solo releases. 2019’s The Intangibles mixtape saw the Togo-born artist further establish his distinct sound through experimentation and collaboration with some his favourite Irish artists – including Outsider YP, God Knows, Farah Elle and Denise Chaila.  On 5th June, as Black Lives Matter protests took place around the world in reaction to the killing of George Floyd by a…

  • Evenings & Weekends – Your Guitar

    August 4, 2020 - By 

    Earlier this year, those lovely people over at Evenings & Weekends, the label run by Dublin’s Loud Mouth Collective, decided give us all a gift, Your Guitar. This 12-track compilation was gifted to the world just before lockdown began and was a perfect companion piece to those long, lonely days. The label, which chiefly trades in downtempo and electronic music, found the opportune moment to deliver their latest broadcast right as we divorced ourselves from the outside world. The brooding, yet warm-hearted, sounds granted us space and much-needed solace in that period isolation, and we suspect it will continue to do…

  • Julianna Barwick – Healing is a Miracle

    July 29, 2020 - By 

    In the four years since her last full-length release, Julianna Barwick uprooted herself from New York City, her home of sixteen years, and relocated to LA. A move spurred on by the need to discover “joy and delight” again, it was in the wake of this change of life and landscape that her aptly-titled, luminous new album, Healing is a Miracle was formed. In the spring of last year, Barwick began work on a new project; sitting down with a pared back array of her “most trusted” pieces of gear, she began shaping melodies, and looping her voice around skeletal,…

  • Bing & Ruth – Species

    July 27, 2020 - By 

    It is that time of the year, when the sun beams with underestimated intensity and humidity creeps upward, smearing the world with a thin veneer of moisture. Everything keeps ratcheting up, it gets harder to think, harder to focus, harder to breathe almost. Cognitive space is required, something to give your brain enough room to remain active and alert but not so much as it gets overwhelmed in this delicate atmosphere. What you need is some sweet, laid back Vibey Synth Shit, or VSS. It’s an umbrella term. It encompasses a vast array of sub-genres and ideologies from film soundtracks,…

  • Bibio – Sleep on the Wing

    July 22, 2020 - By 

    Warp’s finest acoustically-inclined son, Bibio (Stephen James Wilkinson), has returned with Sleep on the Wing. It’s another shining example of meditative, textured experiments in meandering psych-folk and echoing found-sound that, despite being a stylistic sum of the parts of its creator’s output thus far, is anything but an exercise in pastiche. How Wilkinson continues to craft compositionally intriguing records under the auspices of his tried and tested “sound” is difficult to ascertain but the results speak for themselves across the 10 tracks on offer here. Unlike the titular bird to which the EP is tied, Sleep on the Wing does anything…

  • Brigid Mae Power – Head Above the Water

    July 21, 2020 - By 

    Some artists seem to arrive fully formed with a perfect debut that captures the public’s attention, only for their profile to ebb away as future work fails to match an early promise. Others make a slow ascent, each record building on the one before while more ears prick up each time. Brigid Mae Power falls into the latter category. After self releasing some home recordings in the earlier part of the decade, the Galway native made her debut proper with her self-titled 2016 album on cult US folk label Tompkins Square to a positive reception. Her 2018 follow up, The…