• Stream: MELTS – Skyward

    March 30, 2018 - By 

    A new-fangled Dublin comprising ex-members of Ghost Estates, The Things, The Mighty Stef and The North Sea, MELTS are bassist Colm Giles, drummer Gary Earle, vocalist Eoin Kenny, guitarist Hugh O’Reily and Robbie Brady on organ, synth and theremin. Having recently announced that they’re set to appear at this year’s Castlepalooza, the five-piece have unveiled their debut single, ‘Skyward’. A Motorik-driven burst of nuanced, interlocking psych worship, the track was recorded at the Meadow in Co. Wicklow with Irish Duo the Deaf Brothers, who have worked with the likes of Mmoths, Cloud Castle Lake and Come On Live Long in the past. MELTS will release ‘Skyward’…

  • Lunch Machine – Alt Facts

    April 3, 2018 - By 

    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…

  • Premiere: Elaine Malone – No Blood

    March 30, 2018 - By 

    Musically recalling some of Tim Buckley’s airy jazz inclinations, and the gently percussive Weltschmerz of Nick Drake, Elaine Malone‘s new single cranks tension between folk music as a vehicle for aural pleasure and folk music as a vessel for crushingly human storytelling. It’s fitting then, that this Good Friday marks the release of the vital ‘No Blood’. That ‘No Blood’ was written & recorded long before Wednesday’s Laganside Court verdict, and the fact its trenchancy of its sentiment is in no danger of fading any time in the near future is a testament to our need to collectively address & confront these issues that pervade every level…

  • Stream: Spies – Young Dad

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    Following a string of well-received releases via Trout Records since forming back in 2009, Dublin band Spies disappeared off the face of the earth back in 2016. Or so it seemed. Frontman Michael Broderick explains: “We felt in order to write something we were really proud of, we needed to distance ourselves from the outside pressures of being in a band. It’s easy to get distracted by all the things you think you should be doing and overlook that your primary objective should be to write great music”. Having re-emerged today with the inspired ‘Young Dad’ — arguably the five-piece’s strongest single effort to…

  • Watch: The Altered Hours – On My Tongue

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    Having zig-zagged around Europe over the last few weeks, Cork’s finest The Altered Hours will play three highly-anticipated shows in Dublin, Letterkenny and Belfast this weekend. Ahead of those, the five-piece have unveiled Breda Lynch’s visuals for new single ‘On My Tongue’, an incandescent peak from their excellent new EP, Over The Void. Striking yet another killer midpoint between garage, noise and mottled psych manoeuvres, the track is a rousing, nigh on lustful ode to cutting totally fucking loose. Those shows: Thursday, March 29: The Grand Social, Dublin Friday, March 30: Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny Saturday, March 31: The Menagerie, Belfast

  • Girls Names – Stains on Silence

    March 26, 2018 - By 

    It stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, Stains on Silence by Girls Names is one such release. Following 2015’s Arms Around a Vision, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void. “There was a finished – and then aborted – mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,” reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. “We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled…

  • Stream: Dandy’s Loft – Human Dust

    March 23, 2018 - By 

    We have sang the praises of Belfast-based five-piece Dandy’s Loft for some time now. The band, who call Lurgan home, are set to release their highly-anticipated debut album in the coming months. New single and follow-up to January’s ‘Shadows In Motion‘ is the ‘Human Dust’, a self-proclaimed glimpse into the band’s less guitar-orientated material on the album and a real spectral feat. Via a mélange of strings, submerged vocals, synthesiser and some stellar production work, it single-handedly reveals Dandy’s Loft to be much more than any safe or straightforward genre attributed to them thus far. In short: this is vital, inspired and majestic stuff. Stream below.

  • Premiere: tethers – Television Dreams of Human Beings

    March 22, 2018 - By 

    Formed by friends, guitarist/vocalist Zach Trouton and bassist Dane Kemp, and later joined by drummer Alistair Brattle, tethers are a Northern Irish three-piece whose rock-pop sound bears the imprint of jazz and contemporary classical influence, as well as the lyrical influence of science fiction and folklore. Next month, the band will release their debut EP, Skinwalker, via their own imprint, Swallow Song records. According to the Lisburn-based threesome, they’re re-envisioning the term – which, in Navajo folklore, denotes a shape-shifting with that possesses the forms of animals – “as a future slang for artificially-enhanced humanoids”. Doubling up as both the release’s lead track and tethers’…

  • Premiere: Bosco Ramos – Mayflies

    March 19, 2018 - By 

    Belfast bass and drums punk rock duo Bosco Ramos made a sizable dent with the release of their fuzzed-out debut EP, Signs of Life, last year. Today, they’re back with their most emphatic single effort to date in the form of nuanced, unravelling alt rock blitz ‘Mayflies’. A song about “harnessing that thing which allows you to think for yourself and resist what you know to be wrong” it’s a typically groove-laden assault from Phil Brown (bass/vocals) and Callum McGeown (drums/vocals), rounded off with the pair’s progressively singular brand of melodic-yet-pummelling punk rock. In other words, we fucking love it. ‘Mayflies’ is…

  • Doomed & Stoned in Ireland

    March 14, 2018 - By 

    Since its inception, international metal blog Doomed & Stoned has went to great lengths to appraise and give voice to the heft-inclined communities across time and space throughout its sprawling back catalogue of compilations, from obvious hotspots like Portland, to 70s proto-doom, to current day Asia. Incredibly, they’re all available on Bandcamp, on a name-your-price basis. Being one of our most fertile and certainly overlooked creative grounds, it’s vindicating then, that no less than 24 tracks from all corners of Ireland’s doom, stoner & sludge scene comprise Doomed & Stoned In Ireland, the latest in the series. Outright sludge-doom exports like Nomadic Rituals and Slomatics, who’ve played stoner Mecca –  Roadburn Festival – and beyond, are represented alongside…