AOA’s Best Irish Music of 2025

A personal overview of the albums and EPs that made 2025 such a significant year for Irish music

I was in two minds about doing an AOA End Of Year list. On the one hand, I’m tired! Plus, I didn’t start this newsletter with the intention of ranking anything. I wrote about over 120 Irish EPs, albums and singles this year, and I genuinely believe them all to be worth your time. Why not have a rummage through some previous editions and see what you find?

On the other hand, I do feel like the calibre of music released across all corners of this island over the past 12 months has been particularly high. We’ve always punched above our weight, but when the cross-genre quality feels as singular, inspired and deeply rooted as it has this year, it feels worth it to highlight some of the most memorable records of the lot.

So, I’ve compiled a list of 40. These releases are the ones that, to me, resonated most deeply, and represented so much of what makes independent Irish music feel more exciting than it has in a long time. Consider it a personal overview of the records that shaped the country’s soundscape in 2025, or at least my own understanding of it. I appreciate that there’s a lot left out, but isn’t it great to have so much to choose from?

If you were to ask about unifying themes, I’d point to ideas relating to the landscape and our connections to it, homecoming and going, memory and identity, but that’d just scratch the surface of it all really. At a time when a bizarrely fabricated vision of Irish culture is being bottled and sold in the most watered down, anodyne, format across the water, I’d like to think that our musical output, when you really dig into it, is offering something so much more varied, real and interesting.

A few things to note before we get into it. Firstly, save for a handful of records that felt particularly important to include, I’ve limited this list to stuff I wrote about during the year. You’ll find links to the full reviews for each release under the blurb. Secondly, don’t worry too much about the order. I’ve loosely ranked it in “descending” format from top to bottom, but like I said earlier, I think each of these records is really special.

Finally, before we dive in, I wanted to say thank you to anyone who has read, subscribed, shared or sent a message to me about Anois, Os Ard this year. I’m so glad to have this platform where I can explore the island’s musical undergrowth, and that almost 2,000 of you have joined me. I hope in 2026 I can find a way of keeping things up, while endeavouring to find a way of doing so that doesn’t lead to me burning myself out, which, I’ll admit, very nearly happened this year. Who knows what changes to the format that will involve, or what new endeavours this might lead to? As ever, I’m wide open to suggestions as to how to make Anois, Os Ard something that is of value to its readers as well as to the musicians I cover. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to get to write it.

With all that said, I hope you have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. I also hope you find some music to soundtrack the season down below. Until next time, be well.

Eistigí.

Maria Somerville - Luster [4AD]

Written primarily in a house overlooking Lough Corrib, the 12 songs of Maria Somerville’s 4AD debut find her dream pop signature reinvigorated by the Connemara countryside around her. Reverberant shoegaze, folk and ambient instrumentals underscore lyrical vignettes that sound at once hushed and celestial, illuminating the musician’s emotional topography like sunlight on marble. Contributions from Lankum’s Ian Lynch, Olan Monk ,Róisín Berkeley, Henry Earnest, Margie Jean Lewis and Finn Carraher McDonald all assist in bringing the album to life, but the focus rarely deviates from Somerville herself, who’s there in every fibre of this record, navigating the inner landscape of her life in a way that feels truly singular.

Read the full review here.

Rory Sweeney - Old Earth

Rory Sweeney’s varied credentials and omnivorous tastes converge on his second album. Across 10 tracks encompassing everything from post-club refractions and weightless grime to hymnal ambience, hip-hop and Celtic jungle futurism, the producer’s multi-genre talents are alchemised into something genuinely wonderful. With a sprawling cast of guest musicians and MCs on board, it’s also a portrait of a diverse creative community coming together under one canopy, illuminating the collaborative spirit that keeps this scene alive and thriving.

Read the full review here.

Metaxu - Tuam Na Farraige

An ambient-not-ambient sound collage like no other. Melodies pluck heartstrings and vanish in an instant; scrambled radio frequencies evoke memories of dial surfing on long childhood drives; trad folk motifs are suffused with wavering synths, guitars and zithers; a climactic moment might collapse in a flurry of environmental audio, drums and distortion, but its impact will linger in the crackle and buzz that comes after. Catnip for fans of Lia Kohl, claire rousay and Voice Actor, it’s a supercut of emotive ephemera with added exhaust fumes and engine rattle.

Read the full review here.

Junk Drawer - Days Of Heaven [Pizza Pizza Records]

Across 10 tracks of ‘Cosmic Ulster Music’, Belfast’s Junk Drawer dip their indie-psych chassis in a post-punk-art-garage acid bath, channeling everyone from 13th Floor Elevators, Broadcast and Grateful Dead to Television, Ty Segall, Parquet Courts, Wire and Ought. Really though, with their kaleidoscope of riffs, properly lysergic licks, and vocal hooks untangling ideas of identity, male friendship, forgotten pasts and the “lost promised futures that Ulster could have had”, they sound more assuredly like themselves than they ever have.

Read the full review here.

Poor Creature - All Smiles Tonight [River Lea Recordings]

For the members of Poor Creature, songs about loss are nothing new. In the vocal quartet Landless, Ruth Clinton wrings magic from old ballads steeped in longing and despair. In Lankum, fiddle player Cormac Mac Diarmada and drummer John Dermody bring melody, tension and heft to earth-moving doom laments. All of this comes together in their spellbinding debut album All Smiles Tonight – eight songs assembled from an array of eras and stylistic sources, but which coalesce under a spellbinding experimental folk umbrella with splashes of dream-pop, shoegaze and droning psychedelia.

Read the full review here.

lullahush - Ithaca [Future Classic]

Daniel McIntyre stitches a vast catalogue of samples — from Irish trad instrumentals and sean nós to memes, voice notes and cluastuiscint exam audio — into a luminous patchwork. Mixing trad and electronic music is risky business, and often ends up sounding half-baked at best, and incredibly corny at its worst. But lullahush really pulled it off here, showing a reverence to his source material while still finding something new to say with it, exploring themes of memory, belonging and the meaning of home with flourishes of post-dubstep, plunderphonic ambience and more.

Read the full review here.

Junior Brother - The End [Strap Originals]

Ronan Kealy’s third LP as Junior Brother lures us into an uncanny rural soundworld, where his bardic avant-folk is stretched to its limits and his musings on modern dread are filtered through a disorienting lens inspired by folklore and the otherworldly music of fairy forts. Much has been made before of his similarities to acts like Richard Dawson, Captain Beefheart and Joanna Newsom, and those comparisons do linger a little in The End, but what this album really shows is his position as one of modern Irish music’s true originals.

Read the full review here.

The Altered Hours - The Altered Hours [Pizza Pizza Records]

On their third album, the Cork five-piece are on surer footing than ever before, still wielding the psych rock, shoegaze and post-punk influences of their previous output, but arriving at what truly feels like their own open-hearted sweet spot. Across its 10 tracks, Cathal MacGabhann and Elaine Howley’s duetting vocals take centre stage over arrangements dipped in acid blues and smoked-out indie-pop romanticism. There’s a reinvigorated confidence in the back-and-forth vocal hooks, yearning harmonies and blazing instrumentation. It’s the sound of a band with a revitalised belief in who they are – charged up and ready for the next chapter. A good one to belt out in the car.

Read the full review here.

Ultan O’Brien - Dancing The Line [Nyahh Records]

Following his appearance on February’s A Collection of Slow Airs by Some Very Fine Fiddlers, Ultan O’Brien returned to Nyahh Records this year with a suite of original and traditional pieces performed on an alternatively-tuned alto fiddle. The Clare musician — who has played with the likes of John Francis Flynn, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin and Natalia Beylis and is a respected fixture at pub sessions up and down the country — draws on a lifetime spent immersed in this music to produce a collection that’s reverent to its history, but nudges it lovingly outward with innovative techniques, subtle electronics and field recordings.

Read the full review here.

Michael Lightborne - Dormant Volcanoes of Ireland [Gleo Records]

Michael Lightborne tunnels into Irish psychogeography on this debut release for Limerick’s Gleo Records. Across six tracks of tectonic drones and slow-surging rhythms – plus an accompanying zine of illustrations, images and text – the Cork and Birmingham-based artist opens up the vents and crevices of our deep collective consciousness. Unearthing veins of Fomorian blood and epochs of mythological occupation and volcanic activity, we’re invited to navigate notions of post-colonial trauma, climate change and our complicated relationship with the land itself.

Read the full review here.

Amanda Feery - NEST [Krim Kram]

“NEST is an expression of how I feel about home as a refuge, of which everyone is deserving,” says composer Amanda Feery about this operatic drone opus. “But it’s also an expression of my deep sadness about the seizure of home, occupation of land, and the violence of colonisation.” A companion piece to one written for the multi-disciplinary artist and activist Eimear Walshe’s Romantic Ireland exhibition in 2024, the music here – a 43-minute amalgam of organ, electronics, uilleann pipe samples, tin whistle and field recordings – centres on segments of a libretto performed by the male close-harmony quartet 4 in a Bar. A devastating gesture of solidarity, and an ode to the sanctity of home.

Read the full review here.

Olan Monk - Songs For Nothing [AD 93]

Throughout their second album, Inverin’s Olan Monk untangles internal knots and contradictions on the nature of home, absence, and the act of going back to go forward. Informed by the coastal environs in which they grew up, their mix of nocturnal noise pop, digital grunge and traditional Irish folk is at once rugged and teeming with life. Like the Connemara landscape itself, Songs For Nothing is a weather-beaten beauty that’s as enchanting as it is unforgiving. Like standing on the edge of a vast and wild expanse, it’s an ode to the process of relinquishing, and what we find within when we let go of everything else.

Read the full review here.

CMAT - Euro-Country [AWAL]

What is there to say about Euro-Country that hasn’t already been said better by the legions of fans and critics who’ve already lauded it as one the year’s defining records? Like everyone, I got CMAT fever this summer, and while the purpose of this newsletter has always been to focus on stuff that isn’t going to get a tonne of mainstream coverage elsewhere – hence me not reviewing it at the time – there’s simply no denying the absolute pop mastery of these 12 songs. Her set at Green Man festival in August – right before Underworld. What a combo! – was probably the best performance I’ve seen all year. I laughed, I cried, I screeched along. I keep welling up when songs from it come on shuffle? There’s a case to be made for ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ being the closest thing to krautrock to ever chart in Ireland. There’s simply no one doing it like her.

WINO-E - WINO-E [Wah Wah Wino]

Life’s been busy on planet Wino. Dublin’s oddball electronic-dub-club-punk-psyche-et-cetera label sent Discogs diggers into a tailspin in March when it released its latest limited vinyl comp. As with every release on the imprint, it sold out almost instantly, with copies emerging like gold dust here and there ever since, but rarely staying long on the shelf. For the rest of us, there’s YouTube rips – sorry – which showcase an anonymous cast from the Winoverse as they deliver nine cuts of technoid wonk and skronk, K’d out deep house, and otherwise warped and weird dancefloor material.

pôt-pot - Warsaw 480km [Felte Records]

Built mostly out of demos written during a period of physical and emotional freefall for vocalist and drummer Mark Waldron-Hayden, the ten-track debut from Lisbon-via-Cork quintet pôt-pot imbues krautrock, proto-punk and ‘60s psychedelia with a palpable sense of movement and humanity. Fleshed out during full-band studio sessions, there’s a physicality at play here that packs even the most succinct lyrical loops with resonant urgency. All across the record there’s a sense of someone powering through grief and despondency, rolling with the punches and emerging from the other side, not exactly unscathed, but not down yet.

Read the full review here.

God Knows - A Future of the Past [narolane records]

Eight years after lighting the fuse for a burgeoning South West hip-hop scene with Rusangano Family’s Let The Dead Bury The Dead, Zimbabwean-Irish MC God Knows delivered his long anticipated debut LP in September. Over 13 tracks that demonstrate his singular flow, and with typically lively production from longtime sparring partner MuRli, we’re reminded of just how vital a figurehead in Irish music this Shannon rapper is. Encompassing everything from boom-bap and drill to jazz and sampledelic Afrobeat, it’s a project that, in MuRli’s words, gave “God Knows a canvas wide enough to paint the truth as only he can.”

Throwing Shapes - Throwing Shapes [WRWTFWW Records]

Throwing Shapes is the new project from Gareth Quinn Redmond, Méabh McKenna and Ross Chaney. On their debut album, the trio of alchemise 18th century wire-strung harp experiments with modular synthesis and brushed percussion to create an ambitious suite of electronic impressionism that shimmers at the intersection of spiritual jazz, post-rock, ambient and deconstructed chamber music. In a word, it’s gorgeous. You may detect hints of Nala Sinephro, Duval Timothy and Mary Lattimore in its DNA, but the synergy at play is all their own.

Read the full review here.

Ian Nyquist - Gilded [Flood]

On Gilded, Ian Nyquist recontextualises the bodhrán drum entirely, making use of digital modelling software to create shapeshifting electronic music imbued with its uniquely expressive qualities. You’d be forgiven for thinking ‘Reel’ was the work of a techno producer; on the right system, its deep, muffled beat could make walls shake. ‘Alchemy’, ‘5/4’ and 7/4’ spiral around complex time signatures like classics in the PAN catalogue, the bodhrán assuming the the role of a glittering deconstructed club tool. Meanwhile, Barker fans will delight in the rhythmic shimmer of ‘Ouroboros’.

Read the full review here.

Natalia Beylis - Coy-Koi [Longform Editions]

Leitrim’s Natalia Beylis eschewed her penchant for field recordings in favour of the Arturia PolyBrute and Mellotron M4000D synthesisers here, composing a piece that floats along its slow, elegant currents toward infinity. Recorded during a residency at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, it’s pure ambient bliss. It’s music that gestures toward brief everyday marvels, when something as innocuous as feeding a fish can awaken feelings of quiet enchantment and appreciation – moments that, in their own way, take us out of the tank, and drop us into the pond.

Read the full review here.

Mineral Stunting - Come Rain Come Shine [Drift Ritual]

In this album of uncanny ambience and abstract sound collage from Cork’s Eamon Ivri, sub-bass throbs cut through the scurrying dub glitches, quake beneath the frosty synth surfaces, and growl under gusting drones, liquid gurgles and muffled beats. There’s a sense that these tracks are somehow mimicking natural processes, like placing an LSD-soaked stethoscope against an extraterrestrial ecosystem. The world Ivri builds is difficult to discern, but it’s teeming with life, and in a constant state of flux. Attune your ear to its activities, and let yourself get swept away within the gulch.

Read the full review here.

Rún - Rún [Rocket Recordings]

Rún’s heady brew of burnt-out folk, doom metal and dub psychedelia blew my head off at Supersonic Festival in September, so it’s no surprise that these seven tracks did the same some weeks later. Comprising experimental musician and filmmaker Tara Baoth Mooney on vocals and synths, Nurse With Wound collaborator and ex-Jimmy Caker Diarmuid MacDiarmada on bass, and Solar Bear turned studio extraordinaire Rian Trench on drums and production, it’s a project that brims with experience as much as it does with sheer aetherial fuzz.

Read the full review here.

Hilary Woods - Night CRIÚ [Sacred Bones Records]

Hilary Woods rediscovers her voice on Night CRIÚ, rerouting the shadowy atmospherics of her recent instrumental records into the nocturnal slowcore songwriting of her pre-2020 output. Across seven succinct songs steeped in reverberant textures and cassette-like crackle, the musician and analogue filmmaker undergoes a quietly cathartic process, moving through grief into light, and exploring what she recently referred to in The Wire as a “conversation between our singular body and the collective body”. It’s an album of hushed magic, in which the human voice casts a spell of self-reclamation, and invites you to join in its chorus.

Read the full review here.

Physique - Bright Lights, L’il City [Miúin]

Produced over the course of three years, and influenced by everything from Yellow Magic Orchestra and Martin Denny’s Exotica to L.A Noire and Ridley Scott’s video for Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’, these eight tracks are the result of an easy-going collaboration between two friends, passing musical ideas back and forth as you might a meme or a YouTube link. Kilkenny musician Neil Quigley and Chicagoan Sam Scranton weave a wonky take on new age easy listening in the mould of Mort Garson and M. Sage, but with nature’s inspiration traded for something altogether more municipal and mundane. It’s an earnest ode to everyday magic, delivered in a playfully experimental lilt.

Read the full review here.

bog band - Mocashno Days

Preluded with a run of singles that felt like Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile tunes for the bedroom pop generation, bog band’s debut album is as sweet as you’d expect. Stephen Sorensen and Isaac Clarke wear their sophisti-pop influences on their sleeve, but stitch their open-hearted songs with a contemporary thread. Filigreed electronic flourishes and playful production quirks are peppered through their starry-eyed arrangements of guitar, keys and drum machines, carrying honeyed vocals that map a route from Sade to Bullion and back again. Its eight songs pass in just 25 minutes, and are oh so easy to adore. Big tip if you need your soul warmed up a little bit.

Read the full review here.

V/A - Ambient Harvest (Landscape Mixtape) [The Department Of Energy]

Stitched into the patchwork of The Department of Energy’s new mixtape, Ambient Harvest, are pockets of Irish lore. Buried amongst the dew-soaked drones, rustling field recordings and eerie folk deconstructions that make up this 27-track dispatch from the late summer undergrowth, you’ll find spoken interludes that place the music in dialogue with something deeper – something rooted in history, mythology, and the mysterious landscape that flourishes between the two.

Read the full review here.

White Sage - Queen Maeve’s Grave [Little Gem Records]

Inspired by the unexcavated cairn at the summit of Knocknarea in Co. Sligo, where the Neolithic passage tomb of Queen Maeve is said to be buried, this album from Andy Walsh – a producer of “experimental spacewave for astral projecting yourself to the surface of other realms, within and without” – consists largely of recordings from a 2023 live set. The shuffle and faint chatter of the small venue gives life to his ambient electronics, languid basslines and woodwind. From jazzy psychedelia to beautiful electone organ jams and woozy tape loops, it’s a lovely document of live DIY experimentation.

Read the full review here.

Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh - Lux Gratis [KRAAK]

Throughout Lux Gratis, unlikely sounds coalesce in uncanny ways: amidst scrambled frequencies and snatches of bass clarinet, the clatter of a military shipyard rumbles; minimalist drones and bells feel at once menacing and meditative; deep organ tones ebb and flow like breathwork, buoying rustling plucks of electric guitar and wavering keys; industrial echoes morph into the scratch of bowed strings; layered saxophone sighs converse like factory apparatuses. Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s intention was to explore the notion of “treating machine sound as music and musical sound in a more mechanical way”, and to encourage us to consider the ways we think – or don’t think – about the sounds around us, and the meaning and information we can glean from listening closely to our environment.

Read the full review here.

M(h)aol - Something Soft [TULLE]

Something Soft, the second album from feminist post-punks M(h)aol, starts with a whisper. The distorted bass and guitars of ‘Pursuit’ snarl over a mechanical beat as Constnace Keane’s incantatory refrain slowly builds and builds to a blood-curdling shriek, sketching with icy precision the sense of threat that so frequently follows women when walking home late at night. As opening statements go, it’s a scorcher, and it sets the tone for the next 11 tracks. After a few years of curveballs for the band, it makes a strong case for ripping it up and starting again. Incendiary, feverish and cathartic.

Read the full review here.

Omid Geadizadeh – Like The Sea Knows Blue [Wah Wah Wino]

The debut LP from Wino co-founder Omid Geadizadeh stitches rich Iranian santur melodies through a timeless dub framework, with a lysergic jungle remix from fellow label head Morgan Buckley to boot. As with almost every release on the label, it was released on super-limited vinyl and was a near-instant sell-out, but seek it out, and you’ll discover a suite like nothing else released this year, in Ireland or otherwise.

V/A - A Litany Of Failures: Volume V

Now on its fifth edition, A Litany Of Failures compilations offer periodic snapshots of an islandwide independent music scene – a scratched lens survey of an ever-changing DIY soundscape that’s kept afloat by collaboration and a community-focused ethos. Regular AOA readers will recognise at least half of the names in this latest 21-track dispatch, which encompasses everything from psych-rock, post-punk and no wave to avant-folk, experimental pop and oddball electronics. With tracks from pôt-pot, I Dreamed I Dream, Landless, Róis, E The Artist, Rún and so many more, there’s no better primer for Irish alternative music in 2025 than this.

Read the full review here.

Mantua - Galtee Virtual Muse [Fort Evil Fruit]

As Mantua, Cork’s Elaine Malone immerses her signature psych folk framework in lo-fi murk and doom. It’s a heady brew she stirs in Galtee Virtual Muse, an album born out of “heartbreak and hope” — exorcising states of aching desperation and worn down distress, she unleashes nine scuzzy hymns of resilience and DIY dream pop deliverance. Written in two “furious romantic bursts”, these songs feel more conjured than composed. There’s an instinctive rawness to Malone’s meditations on loss and longing, summoned with gusts of distorted guitar, quivering drones and metronomic drum machines.

Read the full review here.

Dave Moran & Jason McNamara - Devil’s Glen [squiggling]

With guitarist Dave Moran in tow, busking drummer Jason McNamara fled the capital and ventured deep into The Devil’s Glen in Wicklow, capturing 70 minutes of “spontaneous forest music” that feels infinitely breezier than his usual frenetic fare. You can watch it all on YouTube: the pair jam away amongst the moss and trees, in sync with the rustling woodland as they float down ambient Americana, leftfield folk and post-rock tributaries, with some crunchy synth and theremin detours to boot. Fans of caroline’s superb 2025 record, Jim O’Rourke’s oeuvre and the Ryley Walker and Charles Rumback collaborative albums will feel right at home here.

Read the full review here.

Negro Impacto - TV DREAMS

California has Tyler, Frank Ocean and Steve Lacy, Richmond has D’Angelo and DJ Harrison, New Jersey has Lauryn Hill, Dallas has Erykah Badu, and Dundalk has Negro Impacto. The alternative R&B and neo-soul duo returned with their first EP in four years this year and it was well worth the wait. A soundtrack to late summer evenings and early mornings, wandering home in the dusky afterglow or heading out into the light of a new day. Across these five tracks, Laurence “StrangeLove” Kapinga and Chi-chi Enyoazu spin a rich soundworld of honeyed vocals, jangly guitars and breezy grooves. It all feels quite special, at once an arrival and the first step toward something even bigger.

Read the full review here.

SuperValu - Loss Leader [Countersunk]

Dublin’s electronic music lodestar Dunk Murphy returned to his SuperValu alias in January with a 16-track suite of “algo-machine funk”. Harnessing generative modular techniques, he conjures electronic melodies and beats that wriggle, shift and evolve in organic and irregular patterns. Like a post-smoke stroll down the aisles of your local Big Shop, the results are mesmerising and dazzlingly bright. Some cuts are reminiscent of the crunchy early 2000s IDM he released on Planet Mu as a member of Ambulance, while others twist the circuits of Detroit techno, electro and Autechrean ambient into his own signature framework. Slam Dunk.

Read the full review here.

Indopan - In Opulence [100% Silk]

Derry-born, Liverpool-based producer Andrew Morrison, whom you might know best for his corroded “tape throb” house and techno tracks as The Cyclist and Buz Ludzha, returned as Indopan this year, pivoting into somewhat sunnier territory. Blowing some of the dust away, the beats, melodies and basslines of these 11 tracks – composed using a Wurlitzer 206A, Korg Polysix, and Marsh UDS “Soviet analog drum brain” – feel brighter; the vocal and instrumental samples clearer. It still has its fair share of hiss and grit, sure, but compared to some of his more recent releases as The Cyclist (and his crunchy UKG and electro contortions as The Motorist) In Opulence feels positively slick, like a bucket of pearlescent paint poured over a shabby dancefloor.

Read the full review here.

Annie-dog - 15

Dublin’s Annie-dog built on the heart-on-sleeve DIY indie-pop momentum of her 2024 debut with 15 a five-tracker that will work wonders for anyone on board the Oklou hype train, but which bears a signature all of its own. Citing Alex G, Dean Blunt and Imogen Heap as influences, the musician has a serious knack for a vocal hook and melody. ‘What Happened’ rides a crisp Y2K R&B beat, and chorus of ‘Have I Been Living?’ has honestly been swirling around my head all year. ‘The Feeling In My Finger Tips’ is a dreamy two-stepper tailor made for introspective journeys home from the club, while ‘Please Forgive Me, David Gray’ and ‘Little Italy’ round things off with the pop finesse.

Read the full review here.

Search Results - Go Mutant

Like using Google in 2025, you can never be totally sure what you’re going to get with Search Results. Throughout their aptly titled second album, Go Mutant, the Dublin band dart between full-pelt post-punk and garage rock, down classic Drag City passages, and across a whole spectrum of DIY indie-pop, often in the space of one song. Unlike the Internet’s favourite tax evaders however, you can rely on these guys to get it right. There’s a tonne of ideas chucked into their blender, but the 13-track outcome goes down like a deliciously strong cocktail.

Read the full review here.

t-woc - Scenes, Journeys & Colors [Rudimentary Records]

A nine track album of technicolor electronica with a dubwise sense of rhythm and a cinematic sound palette comprising woozy synth melodies, spoken samples, field recordings and a generous helping of vocoder. Described as a “chilled out, staring out the window sort of release”, it’s easy to remember the wistful Covid-era headspace this music was made in. Punctuated by more abstract leftfield ambient cuts, it’s a treat. Place yourself next to the nearest window and drift away with it.

Read the full review here.

Softdrink Millionaire - SOUND

There’s a lot to like about this debut EP from Softdrink Millionaire. Led by songwriter and guitarist Josh Fortune, the Bray indie-rock band’s framework is made of familiar materials — some Belle & Sebastian here, a splash of Stereolab there, pinches of Slint, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Microphones and Richard Dawson — but there’s a lyrical zeal and stylistic excitability to these five tunes that feels like their own. I’m just totally charmed by the whole thing.

Read the full review here.

Sal Dulu - Nafuchsia In Fantasy

It’s no surprise to learn that Sal Dulu works to a nocturnal schedule. The Dublin-based producer’s music is the stuff of waking dreamstates, in which fragments of reality fold into the hypnagogic haze to create something uncanny, psychedelic and new. In Nafuchsia In Fantasy, his second album, this manifests in snippets of old TV adverts, brass and string samples, and voice notes from his girlfriend, which are stitched into modular swells and swirling textures steeped in reverb and delay. It’s an abstract tapestry held in place with dusty beats and breaks, from drumfunk stutters to ethereal boom-bap.

Read the full review here.