• Watch: Bouts – Face Up

    It’s been five years since debut LP Nothing Good Gets Away, and four since their last release, Unlearn, but back in style are Dublin indie rock Bouts, with ‘Face Up’. Influenced by the kind of breezy, hook-laden indie rock best placed to soundtrack the main stages of the Irish summer, its DIY video fittingly  papers over the malaise with emphatic optimism. Of the song, frontman Barry Bracken says: “Face Up is a no-filter, punch the air plea for staring things down and pushing on through. Some songs you write, others just materialise. This seemed born ready. Its immediacy excites us as much now as those first moments playing it.…

  • Just Mustard – Wednesday

    We’ve already said it, but it bears repeating – Dundalk’s Just Mustard are becoming one of our favourite bands in Ireland, and on May 2, they release their debut LP, Wednesday. Moulding swooning, soaring psych-gaze from elements of post-punk, lo-fi electronic & trip-hop, their space-conscious guitar abrasions and delicately haunting aquatic vocals, as we’ve described, “taps right into that exact feeling that creeps in at great small Irish festivals around the early evening. You know the one we’re talking about.” The band have “made a conscious effort to provide the listener with the experience of hearing the band in a room, in their natural state, with little to…

  • Watch: Eraser TV – (1-800 COAST 2 COAST)

    Modern Classic is the logically-titled sequel to last year’s Buzzfeed Depression Quiz from self-aware Limerick indie rockers Eraser TV, one of the exciting DIY acts to emerge from the city in the past year. Their second EP once more plays upon the tense, gently experimental discordance underlying in their breezy, occasionally loungy lo-fi indie rock as frontman Cian McGuirk pines throughout, channeling some Pavement circa Crooked Rain wistful reflection on the wonderful ‘Season 2’. Drawing from the everything-is-commercial-bliss vaporwave aesthetic, they’ve just released a video for for ‘(1-800) COAST 2 COAST’. Seeping the liquescent chorus of decades gone by, it’s a hepped-up, psych-tinged take on what Sonic Youth were doing around Evol.…

  • EP Premiere: Ghost Office – Desire Lines

    Almost certainly Belfast’s most promising post-punk prospect, Ghost Office, have just made available their second EP, Desire Lines. With new bassist Carl Small in tow and new material to be unveiled in coming months showing further songwriting spark, Desire Lines is just the beginning of what will be Ghost Office’s defining year so far. With each cut an under 3 minute short burst of undistilled creative flourish, throbbing bass & jagged Fender attack the band – both live and on record – bursts with vitality, while the confluence of musical & literary influences conjure acts like Parquet Courts and Protomartr‘s knowing self-loathing, lent broader purview with vocals from former-bassist MK Maguire, and…

  • Lunch Machine – Alt Facts

    Letterkenny garage indie rock trio Lunch Machine have just released their debut EP, the five track Alt Facts, produced by Fugue State & Tuath. The band is led by Jude Barriscale, whose laconic delivery recalls earlier (and best) Courtney Barnett, Barriscale’s knack for injecting personal, universal truths with a detached sincerity elevates what could be slack meanderings into idiosyncratically-woven pieces, that veer from frustration at rural isolation, political outrage and, in the evocatively smoky, poignant-in-the-AM closer ‘Obi Wan for the Road’, love and loss. Take, for example, the 7> minute highlight ‘Yellow Door’, which is, in her own words “about me being humbled by my past mistakes and about how…

  • Video Premiere: Cruiser – Gram

    We’ve featured a few videos from Limerick’s burgeoning DIY scene this year – notably, Eraser TV & Casavettes – that channel a very certain type of disaffection and sense of growing pains.We’re not sure whether the trend comes from pervading mood in Limerick or that connection when a music scene pulls itself together to embrace each other for the greater good, but adding to that increasingly colossal pile is discordant indie rock outfit Cruiser, with their latest single, ‘Gram’ – which is somehow not even the only wistfully uplifting 9-minute single to emerge from the city in the last half-year. The video – directed by Stephen Savage…

  • Video Premiere: Eraser TV – NYP

    One of the finest to sprout from Limerick’s DIY scene, Eraser TV have some lo-fi scuzz for you this lazy Sunday, in the form of ‘NYP’. It’s the first single from the as-yet-untitled follow-up to their 2017 debut EP Buzzfeed Depression Quiz. Sonically, it’s a direct descendent of idiosyncratic 90s guitar rock a la Dinosaur Jr melded with the anxious excitement of the Dismemberment Plan; add that to its modern indie-punk & emo tint and you’re left with a sound that could’ve fallen off the shelves of the Exploding In Sound catalogue. Where the wartime paranoia video for experimental previous epic ‘Golden Boy‘ was steeped in deeply affecting, this kitschy Eurodance throwback visual accompaniment…

  • Interview & Label Mixtape: Exploding In Sound Records

    Formed in 2011, and based in New York City, Exploding In Sound Records is a tapestry of idiosyncrasy. Pile, for example, are regularly cited as the world’s greatest rock band. Big Ups’ Before A Million Universes was very possibly 2016’s finest noise rock record. The bubbling, emotional cacophony of Ovlov’s 2013 Am has developed its own posthumous devoted cult following, leading to the band reuniting for a second album; not to mention the label’s ability to function as an early outlet and jumping point for Speedy Ortiz, Porches, LVL UP and Palehound. It’s a community. Bands share members, shows and tours together, and there’s a very genuine…

  • 18 for ’18: Any Joy

    We continue 18 for ’18, our feature showcasing eighteen Irish acts we’re convinced are going places in 2018. Throughout January we’re going to be previewing each of those acts, accompanied by words from our writers and an original photograph from one of our photographers. Next up, Any Joy. Photo by Silvio Severino We’ve written platitudes on Cork’s tendency to function as Ireland’s bastion of cosmically-inclined guitar music, and its latest export is Any Joy, who, while tinted with the hue of its primary contemporary export, simultaneously demarcate themselves from the trappings of being a genre band, forever doomed to lay in…

  • Premiere: Aural Air – The Torpor of Minds

    It’s released this Friday, December 8, but we’re pleased to premiere today The Torpor of Minds, the debut EP from Aural Air, the project of Sligo native Laura Rai. This EP follows up on her 2016 debut two-track, Edinburgh – both of which are included on this release. The EP is propelled by the pairing of dreamily soaring, ethereal vocals with the kind of ethereal, off-kilter guitar chime you’d hope for on an Angel Olsen, Anna Calvi or Jeff Buckley record. Following a productive 2017 that saw her play the likes of Stendhal Festival and Sligo’s own Live On Air, The Torpor of Minds looks to propel her further again in 2018. With artwork by Tom Doig, it…