• EP Premiere: Lasertom – Super Saor

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    One half of Choice Prize-winning Dublin duo Ships, Simon Cullen has made sublime electronic sounds under the Lasertom moniker for a number of years now. Having focused on the former project from the last couple of years, Cullen is back in solo mode via Super Saor, a brand new three-track EP, produced written and recorded this year. With all three tracks clocking in over 7 minutes ago, it’s a deceptively expansive, synth-drenched, earworm-heavy release brilliantly blurring the lines between electro, house and nu-disco. Featuring artwork by John Rooney, have a first listen to the EP in full below. Super Saor by Lasertom

  • 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…

  • Video Premiere: Cruiser – Gram

    March 15, 2018 - By 

    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…

  • Robocobra Quartet – Plays Hard To Get

    March 12, 2018 - By 

    Belfast-based jazz-punk ensemble Robocobra Quartet have just announced details of the follow-up to their NI Music Prize-nominated debut album, entitled Plays Hard To Get. Released through Abbreviated Records on May 25 on digital & vinyl formats, it’s going to be one of Ireland’s finest releases of 2018. With drummer, vocalist & producer Chris Ryan once more at the helm, it features a broader palette of sounds, it rocks harder, pushes its avant-garde & contemporary classical flourishes further out there, and is more lyrically daring than ever before – no small statement for arguably the most unique outfit on the island. Never resting on any one idea or preconceived notion, its blackly comic, starkly…

  • EP Stream: The Altered Hours – On My Tongue

    March 9, 2018 - By 

    Two years on from the release of their triumphant debut album, In Heat Not Sorry, Cork five-piece The Altered Hours‘ brand of snaking, crepuscular psych-rock sounds more more singular and vital than ever. Released via Art for Blind/Penske Recordings on 12″ vinyl and digital, the band’s new EP, On My Tongue, is an equal parts murky and prismatic four-track re-affirmation of something we have have always maintained: the Altered Hours are not merely one of the country’s very best bands, they continue to push headlong into a masterfully dazed realm all their very own. Stream the EP in full via Bandcamp below. On My Tongue by…

  • Album Stream: David Kitt – Yous

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Back with his first solo full length in almost a decade, one of modern Ireland’s most enduring, chameleonic songwriters, David Kitt, has just released Yous through All City Records after its preceding Still Don’t Know EP. It’s a soothing, typically stellar effort from Kitt, who, since breaking through with 2001’s bedroom indie mini-masterpiece The Big Romance, consistently remains one step ahead at every point of his musical path, with him in the running for this year’s Choice Music Prize for his electronic New Jackson project. Entirely written and produced by Kitt, aside from a cover of Fever Ray’s ‘Keep The Streets Empty For Me’, it’s a wistful, intimate release, with flashes of a JJ Cale’s Troubadour for the 21st century. As…

  • Album Premiere: Zombie Picnic – Rise of a New Ideology

    March 9, 2018 - By 

    Progressive instrumental post-rock four piece Zombie Picnic release their new album, Rise of a New Ideology today. This follows up on the Limerick outfit’s 2016 debut LP, A Suburb of Earth, and is available on a limited run 12″ vinyl through Bandcamp and Burning Shed. Ideologically, it’s an ambitious work that’s inspired by political figures & commentators, and the most respected names in science fiction literature. As with acts like King Crimson, the finest progressive bands are unconfined by the box in which modern prog rock & post-rock artists find themselves trapped; Zombie Picnic’s sound is imbued with the kind of exploratory, trippy experimentalism found in classic psychedelic & space rock that’s been dragged forward a millennia,…