New Irish Music: April 2025

On Limerick Junction, plus releases from Maria Somerville, lullahush, Mineral Stunting, Indopan and more

The unthinkable has happened: I’ve spent a week romanticising Limerick Junction. For those unaware, Gabhal Luimnigh is an interchange railway station in Tipperary that connects trains travelling between Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, Ennis, Cork and Tralee. Located in the sparsely populated townland of Ballykisteen, surrounded by little more than a few houses, fields and weather-beaten trees, it’s a cold and desolate liminal zone that seems to exist outside of time and space — a Lynchian Red Room made rural.

So why the change of heart? Well, the other day I went to see The Brightening Air by Conor McPherson, which is currently showing at the Old Vic in London. Set within an old farmhouse in Sligo, and starring Brian Gleeson, Rosie Sheehy and Chris O’Dowd amongst others, it’s a play about family, fate, memory and stasis. I loved it for a lot of reasons — if you’re in the area, you really ought to see it — but there’s one segment of dialogue that really stuck with me. Seemingly innocuous at first, a conversation between Sheehy’s Billie and her sister-in-law Lydia achieves a real poignancy as the play goes on. In it, Billie describes Limerick Junction as being less like a limbo, and more like an escape route, a gateway to “anywhere. Like a real place.”

“It’s like a magic door. Get yourself a ticket to Limerick Junction, change platforms, and poof - you’re gone!”

With enough will, she says, a person can get from there to Rosslare Harbour to Paris to Istanbul to Tehran to Varanasi to the Manikarnika Ghat on the banks of the River Ganges, where bodies are cremated “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week”, breaking the cycle of reincarnation. “Your soul is washed clean, and you finally return to nothingness. With none of this life stuck on you anymore.“

I just thought that was great. So maybe that’s why I’m seeing Limerick Junction a bit differently lately. Or maybe it’s because I’m turning 32 next week and I’m remembering all the times I got the rickety train to and from there while in college in Galway, listening to Feist, Frightened Rabbit and Enemies albums and thinking about Skyrim or whatever. Maybe it’s because, after getting an early morning ticket from there around Christmas last year, I was struck dumb by the sight of the not-so-distant Galtees, draped in cloud, fog and the sodium hue of the station lights at dawn.

Dunno. Maybe it’s because a lot of the music I’ve been writing about this month also navigates ideas around home and memory and the nature of places and belonging. A lot of it also considers the landscape, and our interactions with what surrounds us. There are, somehow, two completely unconnected monologues about water.

I know I say this every month, but there’s so much great music to get stuck into below, and I’ve already pissed about too long with this preamble. So let’s get into it.

Eistigí.

Maria Somerville - Luster [4AD]

In January 2019, Maria Somerville paid tribute to the Irish poet, theologian and philosopher John O’Donoghue on her first NTS Radio show, The Invisible World. Interspersing songs by the likes of Broadcast, Grouper, Carla Dal Forno and The Durutti Column with snippets of an interview he gave for The On Being Project, she tapped into his ideas around “the inner landscape of our lives” — an understanding of stillness, space and time as prerequisites for true presence in oneself, of homecoming as a spiritual act, and of rural environments like those on Ireland’s west coast as “huge, wild invitation[s] to extend your imagination”.

All of this resonates in Luster, Somerville’s stunning 4AD debut. Written primarily in a house overlooking Lough Corrib in her native Connemara, where she returned in 2020 after several years away, these 12 songs find the musician’s dream pop signature reinvigorated: reverberant shoegaze, folk and ambient instrumentals underscore lyrical vignettes that sound at once hushed and celestial, illuminating her emotional topography like sunlight on marble. Where her first LP, All My People, conveyed a melancholic longing for home in its misty slowcore balladry, Luster is, at least in part, an ode to place as a catalyst for self-actualisation, and an expression of the serenity that comes from realising where you’re meant to be.

When I met Somerville in December before writing her 4AD artist bio — full disclosure — she spoke of the subconscious influence that the land, community and pace of life at home had on her songwriting — a renewal of creative energy that provided “fertile ground” for free-flowing recording sessions in her living room studio. Although more intrinsic than overt, the expansiveness of this music feels inseparable from that of the environment: tracks like ‘Projections’, ‘Garden’, ‘Spring’ and ‘Stonefly’ conjure the restorative headrush of mountain air as it hits your lungs, or the bracing impact of cold water; ambient folk songs ‘Flutter’, ‘Corrib’ and ‘Halo’ evoke the soft brush of lakeside reeds against skin as they rustle in the wind.

You might detect it in her lyrics too. In ‘Garden’ she sings of the “passage of time” and of “swimming through and out of the cave, reaching the darkest corners of my soul” before reaching warmer waters. In ‘Up’, she buries her broken heart in the soil: “Growing in the ground, rebirthing, to this new life”. Amongst the acoustic strums, shimmering textures and trip-hop drums of ‘Spring’, her incantations sound like something from a dream: “Further shore, kiss me, river, sea, waves of time.”

Multiple collaborators appear on Luster: Lankum’s Ian Lynch lends uilleann pipe drones to ‘Violet’; Margie Jean Lewis plays violin on ‘Flutter’; Olan Monk’s guitars brings a dose of distortion to ‘Stonefly’; Roisin Berkley’s harp glistens like a clear sky at night in ‘Réalt’; recording sessions with Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald, aka Nashpaints, helped “tie it all together”. These contributions assist in bringing Luster 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 singular and true to her. It’s beautiful, really, to hear the essence of a person and place coalesce this way – it’s a mystical, alchemical thing that makes this undoubtedly one of the best albums of the year.

lullahush - Ithaca [Future Classic]

Last year, I wrote about MO LÉAN, an album from Fermanagh’s RÓIS that reimagined the lost art of keening, a lament for the dead in the Gaelic tradition, as a suite of dirging experimental pop. It’s no wonder she was joined by Daniel McIntyre, aka lullahush, at her recent headline show in The Workmans Club: the Athens-based Dubliner’s music casts a similar spell, reconfiguring traditional and contemporary samples into luminous patchworks of electronic music.

His second album, Ithaca, is exceptional. Deriving its title from the island of Greek mythology to which the hero Odysseus longed to return after years in exile, its nine tracks spin an abstract narrative around the notion of home. Considering Ireland’s centuries-long history of emigration, and the breadth of music and literature it’s produced, McIntyre uses his collagist compositions to untangle ideas around memory, identity, belonging and pride. “My search for a sense of home since leaving has made me think about what Ithaca means,” he wrote in the accompanying notes. “Maybe it's not a place, maybe it's a series of circumstances, maybe it's something internal, maybe it’s something you carry around with you.”

It begins with a rendition of ‘An Droighneán Donn’ by sean-nós singer Saileog Ní Cheannabháin, whose subtly tweaked vocals glimmer amidst a flurry of curlew calls, glitching drum fills and twinkling keys. ‘Maggie na bhFlaitheas’ is the record’s first dalliance with dance music, alchemising the whistle reel ‘Over The Moore To Maggie’ with fractals of filigreed harp, crowd noise, plucked bass and a pounding beat. A snippet from Lisa O’Neill’s dockworker’s ode ‘Rock The Machine’ finds its way in there too – a snapshot of yearning that speaks volumes in four words: “I miss the boys”.

Maija Sofia’s vocals enchant two tracks. Amidst a reversing swirl of harp, growling bass and an excerpt from Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy in Ulysses, she sings a lovelorn ballad in ‘Jimmy An Chladaigh’. In ‘Maija an Uisce’, she outlines the role of water in Irish history, ecology, culture and mythology over shuffling bells and flute. There’s a lot going on here: ‘Maddy na Farraige’ refashions a song about sailor leaving home into a dulcimer post-dubstep jewel; ‘Kitty na Gaoithe’ makes use of one of the same keening songs as RÓIS, morphing into a sort of deconstructed club bruiser; ‘Dónal na Gealaí’ starts with an excerpt from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and ends with a concertina pitched down to sound like a malfunctioning vocoder. It all ends at home, with McIntyre’s 97-year-old great uncle singing ‘On Raglan Road’ over crumbling samples and muffled instrumentation. It’s enough to bring a tear to your eye.

There’ll be more from lullahush in this newsletter very soon, but in the meantime I’d implore you to spend some real time with this record. It’s a special one.

Mineral Stunting - Come Rain Come Shine [Drift Ritual]

What is gulch? Sure, a cursory Google will tell you it’s a “deep V-shaped valley formed by erosion”, but ask the discerning ambient fans over on Bandcamp and they’ll probably just point you toward the work of Eamon Ivri. The word has become synonymous with the Cork artist’s output as Mineral Stunting — an alias for abstract works and uncanny sound collages separate from his club-tuned experiments as Lighght — but as Come Rain Come Shine proves, it’s not all that far removed from the official definition anyway.

This album is certainly deep: sub-bass throbs cut through the scurrying glitch of ‘Junk Repurpose’, quake beneath the frosty synth surface of ‘Bottle Chain Dub’, and growl under the gusting drones, liquid gurgles and muffled beats of ‘Canister’. There’s a sense, too, that these tracks are somehow mimicking natural processes, like placing an LSD-soaked stethoscope against an extraterrestrial ecosystem. The sound of water droplets falling on a tinny surface forms the basis of ‘The Drip and the Drain’ — one can imagine its structure being worn down over time as the kicks, keys and distorted oscillations become increasingly unsteady.

There’s a slow motion slushiness to ‘Destiny Melts Like Ice Under a Warm Sun’. An engine starting and what might be a whirring drill mix with smoked-out snatches of synth and erhu in the gorgeous ‘Sink Dub’, evoking, in my mind at least, the sight of a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor. ‘Chasm’, with its eerie plucks and echoes, takes us deep into an alien cave system, while ‘Exo’ burrows into the earth with overdriven drums and splashing torrents of water. 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.

Lila Tirando a Violeta - Dream of Snakes [Unguarded]

When the Uruguayan electronic artist Lila Tiranda a Violeta moved to Ireland in 2023, it didn’t take long for her to fall in love with the countryside around her. From her base in Waterford City, she’d embark on near-daily hikes in nature, capturing field recordings as she followed the Greenway — a former railroad turned walking trail — toward Dungarvan. She’d catch the sound of crashing waves and shifting tides on trips to Tramore beach, the rush of water cascading down Mahon Falls, and the meandering flow of the River Suir between Tipperary and Kilkenny. At the Castleinch car boot sale, she’d let her Tascam take in all the racket and chatter, later layering and manipulating it into works of strange abstract ambience.

Plenty of these sounds appear on her new album, Dream of Snakes, albeit camouflaged under hyperkinetic beats, slippery synths and effect-laced vocals. Their presence is more keenly felt in the music’s physicality — a sense of movement that was directly inspired by the outdoorsy trips she was taking at the time of its production. “I started to feel a strong urge to create music that would inspire me to move around or at least feel the music in my body,” she explained in its accompanying notes. “I wanted to feel the music coursing through my nervous system, that same adrenaline rush I get when watching a David Cronenberg film”.

She pulled it off. While it’s not as if Lila’s previous releases for labels like NAAFI and Hyperdub were lacking in motion — far from it — her work has often been more focused on ideas than dancefloors. By contrast, Dream of Snakes deals in energy first and lets the concepts come later. Across nine cuts and two remixes, rhythmic reconfigurations of IDM, jungle and Latin club warp and let rip: they slice through her head-scrambling sound designs and the collaborative contributions of SideProject, Imaabs, Other Islands, JQ and Eamon Ivri, who appears twice under his Lighght alias. In a word, it’s thrilling: a frenzied celebration of exploration both musical and literal, as unpredictable and exciting as unlocking a new location on your life’s map, or learning the source of a sound you’ve never heard before.

Indopan - In Opulence [100% Silk]

Fun fact: Indopan was a brand name used to market the hallucinogenic stimulant AMT as an antidepressant in the 1960s Soviet Union. It’s also an alias of Derry-born, Liverpool-based producer Andrew Morrison, whom you might know best for his music as The Cyclist and Buz Ludzha. The seams between these monikers are subtle: Morrison’s analog experiments for labels like Leaving Records, Hypercolour and Crash Symbols typically exhibit his “tape throb” signature, a take on house and techno that sounds like it’s been dug out of a cassette crate at the edge of the universe — beats and breaks crackle, vocal samples corrode, basslines warp and disintegrate, but even as his vintage synth melodies waver off their spool, their warmth cuts through the distortion like a solar flare.

Returning to 100% Silk, the Los Angeles label that’s released much of his music over the years, Morrison’s second outing as Indopan pivots 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.

Hazy electric piano keys give way to a wordless vocal and oud melody in the bouncy ‘Basslines For What’, while ‘Indopan’s Break Down’ coats its shuffling UKG beat in galactic glitches and cut up chants. Jazz and dub-inflected deep house (‘Moody Wurlis’, ‘Wanna Go Back’), dreamy kosmische (‘Beats Per Breath’) and stripped-back rave sonics (‘Sky Scratches’) all get the Indopan treatment, but none stand out more than the Elaine Howley-featuring ‘Shore Ellipsis’ and ‘Antigreed’. Conceived as part of a collaborative live set at Open Ear festival 2024, these tracks weave the Cork musician’s ethereal vocals through Morrison’s driving drums and foggy soundscapes. Their palettes are well matched: an intoxicating chemical compound as invigorating as a gust on Sherkin Island’s Banger Cliff, and hallucinatory as the sight of it at sunset.

The Null Club – The Null Club EP

There’s always been a generous splash of techno fuel in Gilla Band’s noise rock tank, so it’s fun to hear guitarist Alan Duggan slam his foot down on that pedal for his debut three-tracker as The Null Club. Accompanied by underground rap luminary E L U C I D, The Horrors’ Faris Badwan and Mandy, Indiana’s Valentine Caulfield, he revs the fuck out of his industrial engine and lets his companions fight their way out of the exhaust fumes.

It’s combustible stuff. E L U C I D squares up to the overdriven pulse and uneasy synth oscillations of ‘Frameshift’, swatting them away and leaving only a quaking sub-bass to face his snarling 60-second spit. Badwan takes a different approach on ‘14 Hours’, allowing his melancholy croon to be subsumed in an MRK drum machine’s throb and churning distortion. ‘Slip Angle’ is as close as this EP gets to a Gilla Band track, with Caulfield’s French deadpan strafing with tense authority, almost Dara Kiely-style, around an onslaught of alarms and a mechanical beat that bears Adam Faulkner’s knack for a knife-edge.

Really though, the fun’s in imagining how far off-road Duggan could take this thing; he’s clearly got the acceleration and studio nous to do so. Considering what other collaborators might step into the ring with him makes the promise of more material — whenever that might come — all the more enticing.

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.

Originally conceived as a solo acoustic suite, SOUND is the result of songs getting fleshed out over time, evolving in unexpected directions as Fortune invited more friends in for recording sessions in 2023. With more members came more ideas, and the EP we have here is full of them. ‘Emerald Meat / Faberge Eggs’ floats down a lovely avant-pop current, complete with a noodly guitar solo, before crashing into a Spiderland-style second half with added brass, post-rock swells and faded snatches of background chat.

‘Pillow Talk’ pulls an equally clattering handbrake turn, but not before we’re taken on an alt-folk waltz down a hapless romantic avenue where trainers get covered in sick and chances evaporate with a shrug. There’s a balance of tenderness and surrealism to the way Fortune spins these poetic yarns: ‘Water (Interlude)’ is a monotone ode to the “ultimate motherfucker to be reckoned with”; he sounds like Dublin’s answer to Junior Brother in ‘Lumpy Mash’ when he pines, “you make me feel tiny, but actually I’m not, I’m seven foot tall”. They’re still growing into their own skin, for sure, but I’ve a feeling Softdrink Millionaire are having a great time working out what works for them, and that’s what makes it exciting. With more music supposedly due before the year is out, It’ll be cool to see what they could become.

Anna Clock - Umbra

Okay look, this EP from the Cork-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist Anna Clock came out in October 2023, but considering this newsletter didn’t exist back then, and they’ve only just toured it with all proceeds going to Medical Aid For Palestinians and Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition, I’m including it in this month’s round-up anyway.

I’m also including it because, quite simply, it rules. Since hearing it for the first time about a month ago I’ve found myself drawn into these minimalist collages of effect-drenched cello, everyday audio and voice again and again. There’s something just so satisfying about the simple-yet-strange arrangements — a sense that you’re being passed to and fro between a domestic space or studio and a trippy dreamstate with a gentle hand.

‘Halver’ lures us in with wandering cello bows, reverberant coos and sub-bass, before ‘Doubles’ strips things back with a solo vocal lullaby a lá Covina Povera. ‘In The Forest’ lays a bed of crackling field recordings beneath layers of sustained strings, which build to a fuzzy peak of delay and feedback amidst glitching vocal samples from Eileen Myles' Poetry as a Performance interview. ‘Getting Dressed’ is all plucks and low-end string bends, a jerky, stumbly piece that sounds like clumsily pulling on a pair of trousers the morning after a feed of pints, but, like, in a good way? ‘Step Ball Challenge’ starts as a duet between Clock’s cello and a dancer’s steps, before a series of grunts, groans, hums and exhalations enter the mix, giving the whole thing the feeling of a fevered meditation or ritual.

Mark Waldron-Hyden - WORLD OCEAN

Mark Waldron-Hyden duets with life’s rhythms on WORLD OCEAN, a collection of tracks recorded in 2022/2023 during an artist residency in The Guesthouse in Cork. The concept is pretty simple: the multi-instrumentalist, whose music as a soloist and pôt-pot bandleader spans noise, drone and psych-rock, improvised around field recordings to create 10 freeform jams that bear elements of each of those styles, but with a sense of easy-going experimentation that feels inherent to the process of fucking about, conversing with the sounds around you, and seeing what sticks.

The process works. Distorted keys and organ drones, broken drum beats, fuzzed-up guitars and murmured mantras mingle with the sounds of birdsong, chatter, water and traffic, alchemising to create a scuzzy-but-sweet filter through which to see the world. Like real life, plenty of it’s hectic and arrhythmic (‘silver arm’, ‘russian candy’) while elsewhere its steady and serene, chugging along nicely like a train (‘to loop is to love’, ‘new new ideas’, ‘unless i do my breathing’).

Gombeen & Doygen - Prada / Sequel [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, just weeks after taking an uncharacteristically lyrical turn with Officer John’s acid-dipped shoegazer, ‘Stay’. It’s also teed up the debut LP from co-founder Omid Geadizadeh, Like The Sea Knows Blue, which stitches rich Iranian santur melodies through dubbed-out sonics, with a full-side remix from fellow label head Morgan Buckley to boot. More on that one in May’s newsletter, but for now, sink your mitts into this two-tracker from Buckley and James Grünfeld, who return to their Gombeen & Doygen guise for the first time since 2022 with two smoked-doused techno thumpers.

‘Prada’ is the sort of dub techno tune you sink into: 10 minutes of Rhythm & Sound-style minimalism mixed with speaker-melting sub-bass, muted guitar plucks and a monochrome vocoder growl-slash-gurgle delivered in German. ‘Sequel’ ups the ante a little, its surging beat underscoring a swirl of psychedelia that conjures early Kraftwerk as much as it does Ricardo Villalobos. Absolute knockout.

So Cow - Rebel Bishop

A couple of years ago, Brian Kelly decided to document every gig he’d ever played as So Cow. From its origins as a solo project in 2005 while he was living in South Korea, through his return to Tuam and touring as a trio, to now, the obsessive spreadsheet exercise didn’t just archive the indie-pop band’s timeline, but sketched out a key part of the guy’s life from his early 20s to the edge of 40. Whether it was nostalgia or boredom or both, the fixation on memory clearly found its way into his ninth album, Rebel Bishop, too. Across 10 lo-fi garage pop tunes – and an accompanying booklet – Kelly mixes his stories and non sequiturs with self-aware sentimentality and a dry sense of humour to navigate his preoccupation with the past and the everyday mundanity of the present.

So Cow’s Bandcamp profile jokes that the project has basically been “20 years of the same song". While I wouldn’t go that far, I suppose the appeal of music in this mould is that, when done well, the familiarity becomes part of the appeal. These songs certainly don’t reinvent any wheels – fans of Television Personalities, Cleaners From Venus and Pavement will feel right at home – but Kelly’s knack for a melody and lyrical hook has kept me coming back a lot over the past month or two.

“You have no choice in the memories you’re going to keep,” he sings in ‘Pints With Terre’, which recounts a road trip from Seattle to Portland. It’s a feeling he revisits in ‘1993’, which questions the steadfastness of incidental recollections – “Football’s gone to Sky TV, there’s no end to the Waco siege” – against the flimsiness of more important ones: “I can’t remember almost anything, no nothing at all.” ‘Rebel Bishop I’ bemoans the bollocks of modern work life over an agitated racket – “Wellness apps and pizza days, I’m 38 and at the zoo with colleagues I have never met” – while ‘Now That I Am 40’ takes a swing at aging and mortality with scuzzy guitars and deadpan wit, two of Kelly’s specialities, which appear in spades across this record.

Various Artists - Aerga Vol. 02 [Ethereal Skies]

Dublin’s Ethereal Skies label returns with the second instalment of its ‘Aerga’ series, absorbing a bevy of club styles into its bliss-focused mainframe across 13 tracks. With contributions from the likes of Lighght, Lúnasa, R.Kitt, LEGIT GIRL DJ, Real Tears and DJ Deep Heat, it covers a lot of ground, from hard dance, techno and experimental trance to maximalist d&b and deconstructed electronica. As ever with DJ and producer darkmavis’ imprint, mix series and party though, there’s a strong current of euphoria running through the whole thing: a glittery, stargazing quality that lends even its most thundering beats and compressed sub-bass moments a certain sparkle.

Lighght – aka Eamon Ivri, aka Mineral Stunting – returns to the club in ‘Scheme Adjustment’, a pounding track that bends its technoid chassis to breaking point, nailing its untethered rhythm in place with grimey bass, sci-fi sirens and rolling claps. Lúnasa’s ‘Sneak’, which I premiered over on DJ Mag, delights in percussion, its hard drum groove underscoring a growling bass pulse and some delightfully cartoonish flourishes. It takes the genre out of its sometimes icy confines and places it onto a dancefloor soaked in brightly coloured paint. It’s a vibe that’s beamed across the compilation — luminous and thrilling in equal measure.

That’s it for this month! Catch you next time.