• Video Premiere: VerseChorusVerse – Chord (Gunn Laws)

    September 13, 2018 - By 

    Tony Wright is going through the most fertile creative stretch of his career right now. Unanimously positive reviews have accompanied the release of the third VerseChorusVerse album, outro, while his new, much-anticipated memoir Another Dickhead (On The Road) is to be launched at Belfast’s The MAC on October 17 – more details on that here – where he also currently happens to be the resident artist. Oh, and he just put in an organic performance co-starring in the heavily relatable Belfast-based short comedy series The Also Rans, the (only partly-fictionalised) tale of a pair of failed musicians. And after all that preamble, we’re today premiering the video for possibly the LP’s finest cut, ‘Chord (Gunn Laws)’. Something…

  • Lisa O’Neill Set to Launch Fourth Album at Vicar Street

    September 10, 2018 - By 

    Unquestionably one of the finest folk voices in Ireland, Cavan native Lisa O’Neill, has announced details of her fourth album, Heard A Long Gone Song. Following a sellout show at Quiet Lights Festival in Cork & ahead of upcoming dates in the UK, New Zealand and beyond, the album will come out on October 19, and will be her first release on Rough Trade imprint River Lea Records. To mark its release, it will be launched at Vicar Street on October 27 in a seated performance. Heard A Long Gone Song was co-produced at Blackbox Studios alongside Dave Odlum. Featuring a broad cast of musicians in Cormac Begley, Christophe…

  • Premiere: Sun Mahshene – Tales of Fiction

    September 10, 2018 - By 

    Eight months on from being featured as one of our 18 for ’18 acts, Dublin collective Sun Mahshene are back with the video for their strongest single effort to date, ‘Tales of Fiction’. Blurring the lines between the band’s hazy brand of psych-speckled indie, the July single is brought to life via director Gerard Walsh’s narrative-driven video, which stars Ieva Grigaite and Desmond Eastwood. Have a first look below.

  • Premiere: Milky Teeth – Waiting Up For You

    September 10, 2018 - By 

    Last year we had the pleasure of premiering the first two singles from Milky Teeth AKA Robbie Barron of The Shaker Hymn and John Blek & The Rats. Some sixteen months on, the Cork musician returns in his solo guise. During some downtime from Shaker Hymn commitments over the summer, Barron put the final touches on the debut Milky Teeth album, which is set for release within the coming months. Produced, engineered, and mixed in his home studio, new single, the sublime ‘Waiting Up For You’ is another wonderfully crafted dose of alt-pop from Barron, and a taste of what to expect from his forthcoming full-length solo LP. A montage of…

  • Watch: O Emperor – Girl

    September 6, 2018 - By 

    Having re-emerged back in January with their first single in two years, ‘Make It Rain’, Waterford five-piece O Emperor have just gone one better and released one of our Irish tracks of the year in the form of ‘Girl’. Featuring some first-rate dreamscape-like visuals courtesy of director Paul Savage, it marries doo-wop croon and psych-tinged dream-pop textures with slack hip-hop influence.  Ahead of full details about the band’s forthcoming new album, due this year, delve in below.

  • Stream: Documenta – The Blue Sleep

    September 6, 2018 - By 

    We recently snuck a sneak peek of the forthcoming new EP from Belfast’s drone-pop septet Documenta and let it be known: we’re in for something very special indeed. Featuring the inimitable Will Carruthers of Spacemen 3, Spiritualized et. al, the five-track Lady with Ring will be released on vinyl EP and digital formats via Touch Sensitive Records on Friday, October 12. A release that doubles up as a departure from the band’s Drone Pop trilogy, the EP revolves around the story of Margorie McCall. We’re told: “McCall lived in rural Ireland in the early 18th century. She succumbed to a fever and…

  • EP Premiere: Elaine Malone – Land

    August 29, 2018 - By 

    Ahead of high-profile performances at Electric Picnic & Quiet Lights Festival, the debut EP that Limerick-born, Cork-based singer-songwriter Elaine Malone has been drip-feeding elements of throughout the year is finally here. Vivid stories manage to sidestep the usual potholes of romantic imagery, as Malone strings together a narrative as well as one can across four tracks. Pop moment ‘You’ warbles its way into existence, glaring directly into the once-beating heart of first love, with its honesty cushioned by psychedelic, oneiric arrangements, going onto explore similar, loose threads of humanity. We made some grand statements some months back about about her last single ‘No Blood’, which “musically recalls some of Tim Buckley’s airy jazz…

  • Watch: Tristan Da Cunha – Opa

    August 22, 2018 - By 

    You know what’s lovely and accomplished to nth degree? The debut single from Co. Wicklow’s Tristan Howard AKA Tristan Da Cunha. A woozy, snug-as-hell swell of homespun bedroom-pop, it marries sleepyheaded hip-hop instrumentalism via intent-drenched, longing lo-fidelity. Long story short: it’s one of our Irish songs of the year so far. Directed by Howard and Leslie Sharpe, and edited by Sam Zarrin, check out its video below.

  • Inbound: ABQ

    August 21, 2018 - By 

    Off the back of their debut single ‘Takes So Long’, Paul Shevlin of London-based Belfast quartet ABQ (AKA Albuquerque) talks process, pressure, the power of the right producer and keeping up with the scene back home. Hello ABQ. You have been playing together in different guises over the last few years, but the band still feels very new. For those of us not in the know, what’s the backstory to ABQ and what’s changed? It was a fairly natural transition from previous projects to ABQ. We’ve all played in and around the NI music scene for years and when an…

  • Watch: Villagers – Fool

    August 20, 2018 - By 

    Ahead of the release of his fourth album, The Art of Pretending How To Swim, Conor O’Brien’s Villagers have unveiled the video for new single ‘Fool’. A self-proclaimed “romantic battle-cry from the centre of a technological dystopia”, the video – which was directed by Bob Gallagher, the whiz behind the video for Villagers’ previous single ‘A Trick of the Light’ – takes the lyrics (“So here is my bleeding heart. Will you take the pain away?”) as a starting point for the narrative. “The video is a surreal take on a marriage proposal, which is the ultimate gambit in love,” says Gallagher. The scenario pushes how…