• EP Premiere: Poor Petal – zzz

    March 24, 2021 - By 

    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…

  • EP Premiere: Mark Loughrey – On Through The Veil Anew

    December 10, 2020 - By 

    On Through The Veil Anew is the new five-track EP from experimental folk artist Mark Loughrey, born near the border town of Strabane, and currently based in Berlin. His first major release since the 2017 release of debut album, Treppenwitz, it’s both sonically and thematically a marked progression towards more ambitious arrangements and experimental storytelling. Drawing from the kind of subtly subversive contemporary Northern Folk tradition carried out by the likes of Arborist & Joshua Burnside, it’s steeped in roots, but subtly subversive of genre convention. Its expansive, yet intricate, organically arranged compositions at varying points call to mind the earthly etherealism of Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird…

  • EP Premiere + Q+A: Badhands – Oceans

    November 26, 2020 - By 

    The popularity of the sea, particularly in recent years, has become somewhat of an astonishing phenomenon. Images shared by friends and acquaintances online of their sea swimming adventures are perpetual, even in cold winter climates. There’s no denying that the activity is both restorative and reinvigorating. For many, it has been a consistent companion in finding a release with anxiety and other personal struggles. A huge aspect to the appeal of the sea is its vastness and unpredictability, your eye can only distinguish so much in the distance and so your imagination is allowed to roam.  This is an integral…

  • EP Premiere: Fonda – No Begonias

    May 7, 2020 - By 

    Our love for Fonda is no secret. Over the last few years, incarnations of the Liam O’Connor-fronted band have split time between Limerick, Glasgow and Galway. Its latest incarnation, compromising John Ahern of Hey Rusty, Paul Cosgrave of Slow Riot and Sean O’Mahony of Inner City Radio, feels like a definitive formation – the logical ultimate form of a band conspiring to make O’Connor’s tales come to life. Recorded last year by Chris Quigley of Cruiser and mixed by Micheàl Keating of Bleeding Heart Pigeons, the band’s new EP, No Begonias, is a masterful consolidation of their mission statement to date. From highlight ‘The Way Out’…

  • EP Premiere: Naoise Roo – Sick Girlfriend

    April 23, 2020 - By 

    With singles drip-fed over the course of the last year, we’ve been patiently anticipating the extended follow-up to Naoise Roo‘s masterful debut album Lilith for some time now. Finally, with the cosmos’ on-brand sense of blackly comic timing very much in tact, the Sick Girlfriend EP is out tomorrow. A fully-formed statement that, across just four snapshots, embraces life in all its ugliness and challenges the accountable norms within the industry. Alongside producer Liam Mulvaney, bassist Daniel Fox & Rian Trench on drums & synth, she ably treads the line between emotionally-driven textural experimentation without forgoing her ability to create gargantuan introvert’s pop banger. Much like the subversive, zeitgeist-capturing album of 2020 in Fiona Apple’s Fetch…

  • EP Premiere: Comrade Hat – Tuque

    May 3, 2019 - By 

    Derry-based experimental pop auteur Neil Burns’ Comrade Hat‘s latest EP, Tuque, is set for release on May 10, but we’re pleased to say we have an exclusive premiere streaming a week in advance. Following a string of EPs – including his series of Winter EPs – production credits, and a high profile collaboration with Phil Kieran and the Ulster Orchestra at Celtronic 2018, Burns needed a change. In Autumn of 2018, he relocated to Toronto with some musician friends for a recharge that ultimately led to the creation of Tuque, a complete work that spans post-breakup what’s-it-all-about soul-searching to geopolitical observations in under 15 minutes, with cameos from cult musical figures of the area,…

  • EP Premiere: Alpha Chrome Yayo – Malediction Boulevard

    April 26, 2019 - By 

    If you’re a regular reader of The Thin Air, you’ll likely be familiar with Belfast producer and musician Alpha Chrome Yayo. Fluent in the acrolect of synth-drenched retromancy, his output to date has taken a cue from everything from Giorgio Moroder and Steve Vai to the works of William Gibson and smoke-filled arcades. New EP Malediction Boulevard is his most assured and comprehensively impressive effort to date. Bearing the imprint of Gothic influence – namely the likes of The Sisters of Mercy, The Cure and Goblin, as well as the films of Lucio Fulci and David Cronenberg – it’s a four-track blitz…

  • EP Premiere: May Rosa – Waxwork Sweetheart

    February 14, 2019 - By 

    Having confidently marked her arrival with debut single ‘Dancing in the Debris’ back in 2017, Belfast artist May Rosa establishes her as a fully-formed alt-pop contender on Waxwork Sweetheart. Across four tracks – from slow-burning lead single ‘All The Ways’ to the release’s Julee Cruise-summoning title track, it sees the London-based chanteuse’s finely-woven and phantasmal craft refined to seventeen all-too-fleeting minutes. Have a first listen to the EP – and a first look at the video for ‘All The Ways’ – below.

  • EP Premiere: Sweat Threats – Sweet Treats

    October 12, 2018 - By 

    We’ve been fans of the righteous post-punk party music of Sweat Threats since they reared their heads at the start of 2018 – and most recently last month’s ‘Suffocate‘ – and today, we’re delighted to lay down on a platter assorted Sweet Treats, the debut EP from the London-based Irish pairing of Niall Jackson (Bouts/Swimmers Jackson) and Matthew Sutton (It was All a Bit Black and White/Tayne) – recently joined by drummer Lucy Brown. Very much in line with their modus operandi, Sweet Treats is a six track earworm infestation, filled with that Death From Above, Idles & Fucked Up strain of insurgent punk that links hips to brains. Written around themes…

  • EP Premiere: Oh Joy – Good Grief

    June 5, 2018 - By 

    A couple of weeks back, we shared ‘Cab Sad’ by Dublin three-piece Oh Joy, a song we said captured “intent, psychic wanderlust and heartbreak across 141 all-too-short seconds”. Now we’re pleased to present a first listen to the release from which it’s taken. Officially out on Friday (June 8), Good Grief is an EP brimming with the emotionally-charged hallmarks that make their knowingly self-deprecating “mope-rock” craft nigh so irresistible. From the aforementioned lead single to masterfully melancholic closer ‘Pepsi’ via ‘Volunteer’ and ‘Hot Strange It All Became’, the band have, across fifteen minutes, comfortably confirmed their arrival as one of the country’s most vital bands. Oh…