• Video Premiere: Jake Regan – Unfair

    September 25, 2019 - By 

    When Jake Regan‘s debut single ‘Over It’ came out, we said he’d “instantly staked his claim as one of the country’s most promising and distinctive songwriting voices”, and new double A-side ‘Unfair / Stay’ compounds that fact – with the former’s video out today. It’s a perfect 3 minute, scuzzed-out power-pop song about the would-be artist’s reality crash-landing that deftly navigates the tightrope between sincere & pointedly self-aware. Based on the oh-so-relatable D.I.Y. artist’s perspective, Regan tells us more: “The song came from frustration at the stratospheric recent success of the Fontaines, and the weird flurry of identical bands that followed them. There are so many angry young men…

  • Video Premiere: Percolator – Freshin

    August 28, 2019 - By 

    Since the release of their debut LP and our runaway album of 2017, we’ve been sitting on our hands waiting on fresh cosmische mastery from Percolator for what fees like eons. At long last, we can breathe, as the Dublin-based trio have just followed Sestra with a video for their next single, ‘Freshin’. More than delivering on expectation, the new single leans further into the slaloming, hypnosis-inducing rhythmic interplay that made their debut album such an exciting proposition. The track was written and recorded for An Taobh Tuathail‘s twentieth anniversary back in May, but the band liked it enough to release it as a digital download single with…

  • Video Premiere: Not I – Please, No Kindness, Please

    August 15, 2019 - By 

    Being a consistently arresting two-piece is no easy task – not least when the majority mines along the garage-blues-punk spectrum with little deviation. Dublin duo Not I – formerly Nervvs – take a hard left into something far more sophisticated by virtue of their grasp of minimalism, and seemingly telepathic interplay between vocalist/guitarist Thomas O’Reilly & drummer Ian Meagher. The title track of their debut album is an immediate primer for the band, O’Reilly’s sardonic, kitchen sink worldview screams for meaning in the mundane; “It’s a song about the struggle to make art and not get lost in the swamp of the day-to-day, resolving with an…

  • Video Premiere: The Elephant Room – Juniper and Pine

    May 31, 2019 - By 

    Dublin-based indie-noise outfit The Elephant Room are one of a select number of DIY artists in Ireland assimilating a broad range of influences from the 60s through to the present year with complete seamlessness. We’re pleased to be premiering their sprawling new single ‘Juniper & Pine’, complete with the band’s self-made video. The song itself is an almost ten minute marriage of experimental noisecraft and lo-fi pop that somehow never outstays its welcome as ekes out new levels of its conceptual framework. Easing in with a Laurel Canyon-indebted neo-psych groove, its lysergic-soaked corners quickly darken into a clamorous sonic ego-death parallel, before returning to consensus reality as something familiar, yet altered.…

  • Video Premiere: Buí – Something Else To Talk About

    May 27, 2019 - By 

    Despite their relatively young age, kitchen sink indie rock five piece Buí have been crafting some of the most earnestly well-crafted power-pop tunes around. Not ones to tread the beaten path, they debuted with a fully-fledged long-player in 2017’s Eugene, and have since been built their DIY profile from the ground up. The video for new single ‘Something Else To Talk About’ is an astounding feat – an 8-bit video game animation that not just acts as an apt visual companion to the song, but functions as its own winsome arcade fable. As if the band were collectively assimilated into a Scott Pilgrim fever dream – each…

  • Video Premiere: Grave Goods – Source

    May 16, 2019 - By 

    Ahead of only their third show to date, supporting Beak> this Saturday, May 18 at Whelan’s, tri-city post-punk trio Grave Goods have kindly given us a first recorded glimpse of their visceral power. ‘Source’ is the first release from a session filmed by experimental filmmaking platform IMPATV, which records & broadcasts the heavier side of DIY, experimental & underground culture. Featuring members of Pins, Girls Names and September Girls, ‘Source’ forgoes the brooding atmospheres & jangle of the aforementioned in favour of primal urgency. More than delivering on the promise of its constituent parts, Sarah Grimes & Phil Quinn’s Girl Band-recalling rhythmic syncopation lay claustrophobic, anxious loops between which Lois MacDonald’s buzzsaw guitar finds voids to…

  • Video Premiere: Shrug Life – 2009

    May 13, 2019 - By 

    One of the finest cuts from last year’s A Litany of Failures Vol. II independent compilation was Shrug Life‘s ‘2009’, a misleadingly uptempo ditty that mined reprieve from the jowls of self-imposed doom. Matter-of-factly delivered, Danny Carroll addresses the effect of the too-often underexamined (by musicians) abuse of bad hash as a crutch in times of mental ill-health: “Days previous I felt like a genius; sleepless, but safe in my cure for cancer, awake for six nights, working on the answer.” Of the track, Carroll said: “‘2009′ is an awkwardly accurate description of where I found myself in my late adolescence – suffering from sleep-deprived psychosis, perpetually…

  • Video Premiere: Casavettes – I’m Not Here, I’m Somewhere Else

    February 22, 2019 - By 

    It’s just five days from the release of Limerick emo trio Casavettes‘ debut album, Senselessness. One of the pillars of the DIY LK community, new single ‘I’m Not Here, I’m Somewhere Else’ is a low-key diversion from their anthemic early-Biffy inspired work, with its glacial guitar conjuring myopic images of that post-relationship confusion and detachment. Tastefully shot by the band and edited by Colm O’Shea, its non-linear monochrome video was inspired in part by All This Can Happen by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton, revealing lived layers of undefined beginnings and endings by dividing the frame in two. Artwork for both ‘I’m Not Here…’ & Senseless comes from Laya Meabhdh Kenny, with…

  • Watch: Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies – Full-Time Mad Bastard

    February 15, 2019 - By 

    Sure he only put out one of our Irish tracks of the year in ‘Never Coming Back’ at the tail end of 2018, but Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies‘ second EP, Post Millennium Tension, is with us, and so too is the video for lead single ‘Full Time Mad Bastard’.  Generally speaking, he’s one of the best at chronicling & satirising every social issue imposed by the elder half upon the younger half of the island’s consciousness. He’s is back with a hot new visage for the year, with an album in the works, he was one of our 19 for ’19 acts for good reason. …

  • Video Premiere: Post Punk Podge feat. TPM – Government Security

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    One of our 19 for ’19 featured artists, Limerick’s Post Punk Podge and the Technohippies are back with another establishment-botherer in the form of ‘Government Security’. Tackling the insidious danger of their hapless rep, given what they’ve been at recently, it’s another timely number from one of Ireland’s foremost Zeitgeist-catchers. Mixed by Theodore Vain and featuring a cameo from Dundalk duo TPM, this single precedes his forthcoming EP, Post Millennium Tension – out February 15. One of the most engaging live performers and prolific acts on the isle, Podge is currently working on his debut album, a mixtape, and astonishingly, ‘Government Security’ won’t even feature on the new EP. Grab the track…