• Premiere: Like Chandeliers – Scars

    December 13, 2019 - By 

    Dublin three-piece Ronan Jackson, Nigel Farrelly and Christopher Barry aka Like Chandeliers have been concocting supremely sleepy sounds since 2016. Doubling up as their latest and greatest effort to date, new single ‘Scars’ is a wonderfully balmy dose of dream-pop, marrying broad, Badalamentian washes of synth with twinkling arps and Kranky-worthy, spoken-word vocals. Think Devotion-era Beach House, playing in the corner in a back room of the Bang Bang Bar, quietly relaying the heart-stung pangs and unknowability of it all in super slo-mo. It’s something Rita Macedo’s beautifully understated visuals for the track taps into and then some. Have a first listen and look below.

  • Album Premiere: Eoin Dolan – Commander of Sapiens

    November 22, 2019 - By 

    On his third full-length LP, Commander of Sapiens, Galway musician Eoin Dolan underscores his status as one of the country’s finest songwriters. Conjuring everyone from Animal Collective to the Beach Boys, songs like ‘Microship Visions’ and ‘Sheena’ meld starry-eyed harmonies and cosmic wanderlust with masterfully woozy refrains and sublime melancholia to deliver nine tracks of first-rate, surf-influenced sci-fi pop. Released in proud association with Galway-based collective Citóg and featuring long term collaborators Conor Deasy (guitar), James Casserly (drums) and Adam Sheeran (bass), the album wonderfully veers between themes including environmental destruction, mass consumerism and human cybernetics. Surely you’re sold by now? Stream it…

  • Album Premiere: Jogging – Whole Heart

    October 31, 2019 - By 

    We’ve premiered our fair share of albums here on The Thin Air, but – if truth be told – we’re struggling to recall one that we’ve loved so much, and so quickly, as Whole Heart by Dublin three-piece Jogging. The long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s Take Courage, it’s an emphatic (and rather heavier) ten-track return from Darren Craig, Gerard Mangan and Ronan Jackson. Out today via one of the country’s finest imprints, Out On a Limb, the album was engineered and produced by John “Spud” Murphy and Ian Chestnutt at Guerrilla Sound Studios in Dublin at the start of the year. To mark…

  • Premiere: Laurie Shaw – Had To Swerve

    October 29, 2019 - By 

    This Thursday, endlessly prolific, Cork-based songwriter Laurie Shaw will release his latest album, Helvetica. The follow-up to the exquisite Weird Weekends (which we premiered last January) the redord, we’re told, “delves deep into the British psyche, taking a poignant and timely look at its history and current society, moving between both fond and satirical tones.” New single ‘Had To Swerve’ edges into more darkly territory. Conjuring a midpoint between Sparklehorse, Department of Eagles and Amnesiac-era Radiohead, it makes for a brilliantly oppressive four-minute burst of scorched vocals and layered, spectral sounds. Have a first look at the Laurie Shaw-directed video for the single, as…

  • Video Premiere: Rory Nellis – When I Sleep

    October 17, 2019 - By 

    Over the last few years, Belfast artist Rory Nellis has steadily emerged as one of the country’s most respected songwriting voices. On albums Ready For You Now and 2017’s There’s Enough Songs In The World, his thoughtful, earworming craft has garnered comparisons to everyone from Conor O’Brien Villagers to Grandaddy at their most gossamer and contemplative. Nellis’ forthcoming new single, ‘When I Sleep’ is a meditative and delicately-crafted case in point. Released ahead of a new album in the works for release next year – and mixed by and featuring backing vocals from long-time friend collaborator Philip Watts d’Alton (Master…

  • Premiere: Violet Fields – All My Life

    September 30, 2019 - By 

    Over the last couple of years, Berlin-based quartet Violet Fields have emerged as a force to be reckoned with within the realm of psych-leaning garage pop. Acclaimed by the likes of Clash Magazine and The Line of Best Fit, their fast rise is distilled on their emphatic new single, ‘All My Life’. Fronted by Joe Chant and Coco Ramona, the Berlin quartet’s organ-dappled, starry-eyed craft simultaneously pushes forward and throws back to an era when Britpop dominated the airwaves. This synthesis is laid bare on their brilliant, burrowing new track. Across four minutes, it makes for a slick, harmony-laden ode…

  • Video Premiere: The Bonk – May Feign

    September 25, 2019 - By 

    The first of ten commandments that Captain Beefheart drilled into guitarist Moris Tepper upon joining the band in 1976 was: “Listen to the birds – That’s where all music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.” If you’ve caught The Bonk live, then you’ll know what it is to be hypnotised by exactly that pendulous meditation on a single groove, as each of their seven(ish) members instinctively weave around each other, while time falls away. Today, we’re delighted to premiere ‘May Feign’,…

  • Premiere: Panik Attaks – Mr Supplier (Live)

    August 22, 2019 - By 

    Two months on from unveiling ‘Terror’ – a single that we called a heady self-exorcism from the Dublin five-piece – Panik Attacks are back with a sneak peek of some new material. It comes in the form of a live video of ‘Mr Supplier’, a nine-minute effort that, despite being a self-described “early days jam”, manages to capture the darkly push-and-pull of the Rob Walsh-fronted band’s oppressive punk craft. Shot in one take at The Meadow by SCAN, it finds Walsh in particularly possessed form, recounting a mind-bending DMT trip. Have a first look and listen below.  

  • Premiere: The Rackets – 1-2 FU/Dead Rebel

    July 31, 2019 - By 

    For whatever combination of reasons, Belfast has peerless form for producing first-rate garage bands. From Them and The Wheels back in the 1960s right up to The Groundlings, The Dreads and others in the present era, the city has always reliably churned out bands wielding straight-up rock ‘n’ roll like it’s no one’s business. In the day of our Lord  John Dwyer, you need not look much further than The Rackets. A suitably elusive outfit, with an ever-revolving line-up, the band currently operate as a three-piece of Sunglasses After Dark’s Ryan Fitzsimmons, frontwoman Aileen McKenna aka This Ship Argo and the downright legendary Chappy of the aforementioned The Groundlings…

  • Premiere: Citóg Records Volume Four – Too Much Can Kill You

    July 9, 2019 - By 

    On Thursday (July 11) Galway independent label Citóg Records will launch its highly-anticipatd fourth annual compilation at the Róisín Dubh. Once again, it’s a prime opportunity to hone in on just how far the label has come. Across eleven tracks, this new installment (which is titled Too Much Can Kill You) offers a remarkably varied and totally inspired snapshot of Citóg as a collective of artists, collaborators and friends. From the woozy sci-fi surf of Eoin Dolan’s ‘Superior Fiction’ and Tracy Bruen’s shapeshifting ‘Mirror’ to the inward-peering indie-folk of ‘Amsterdam’ by David Boland aka New Pope and beyond, it’s full, genre-spanning testament to the importance…