New Irish Music: March 2025
On Haunted Mound’s Irish connection, plus new music from Ultan O’Brien, Mantua, God Knows and more
One of the most talked about albums in certain online circles this month has been Ghost Mountain’s October Country. I’ll admit, I wasn’t familiar with the Sacramento, California artist or the Haunted Mound collective he co-founded in 2019 at all until recently. Their woozy blend of emo, rap and witch house isn’t the sort of thing I naturally gravitate toward, but I gotta say, after a couple of listens I’m really starting to believe the hype. There’s a small town goth aesthetic to it all that gets under the skin a bit. I’m into it.
But Eoin, isn’t this an Irish music newsletter? Well, funny you should mention that. While I’m not going to get into the inner workings and interpersonal dramas that seem to have befallen the Haunted Mound collective over the past six years — Ghost Mountain split from the group in 2021, abandoning music almost entirely before rejoining with this album — my curiosity was piqued when I found out that two of its members are Irish. Always find the local angle, folks.
I guess I’m showing my own ignorance here. Rapper Buckshot and producer Oscar18 are both artists whose streaming figures reliably smash into the hundreds of thousands; not knowing about them is definitely an oversight on my part. (Not my first, and very unlikely to be my last).
Anyway, Oscar18 produced seven of the 12 tracks on October Country, and Buckshot contributes vocals to ‘Familiar Stranger’. Cool, no? But wait, there’s more! Dublin’s Asa Nisi Masa — whose Days Without Night EP I wrote about here — lends guitar and additional production to ‘Stalks’. Connemara’s Olan Monk — an artist I’ve admired for a long time whose gothic art rock, I would argue, prefaced the whole Haunted Mound vibe — does the same on ‘Familiar Stranger’.
The whole thing has got me thinking about how much music thrives in online communities that I’m simply not privy to. It’s not a new realisation by any stretch, but I guess it’s given me cause to consider once again how, even in the seemingly niche world of “underground” and “alternative” Irish music, I’m as liable as anyone to fall into a bubble of sorts, and there’s always much, much more to discover. And that’s exciting! (On that, I really enjoyed Dylan Murphy’s recent piece for The Face on the Irish rap, R&B and alternative artists of colour making waves internationally and online while the media at home struggles to catch up.)
Anyway, anyway, anyway. Sorry that March’s newsletter is a few days late. It was a wild month and there was a lot of music to cover. I’ll be back again at the end of April with another round-up, and the first AOA Mix of the year will be coming out next week! Big things coming, as they say. In the meantime, dig into some great new releases below.
Eistigí.
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 returns to Nyahh Records 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.
It starts simply enough, easing in with an original air (‘Iron Mountain Foothills’) that demonstrates the low end “resonance and growl” that guided O’Brien’s bow as he pieced the album together. He relishes the double stop, often playing multiple notes at once to create a rich, full sound in dance sets like ‘The Four Courts / Rolling in the Barrel’ and ‘Domhnall na Griana / The Butcher’s March Two’. You’ll feel it keenly in ‘It Was In The Year Eighteen Hundred And Four’, a pre-famine tune unearthed from the William Forde collection that’s embellished with a faint accordion buzz and an atmospheric breeze recorded on the Whitestrand beach.
A struck match introduces ‘Macha’, an undulating duet of legato bows and soft-focus ambience that signals the record’s pivot toward a more experimental second half. ‘Down in Whitestrand’, ‘Secret House in Fintra Beg’ and ‘Death Doula Meet’ scatter sweet conversational voice notes amongst plucked passages, multi-layered string murmurations, synthesised glitches and sound collage. “Isn’t death just a Divil,” Edwina Guckian remarks gently in the closing tune. “It just lands on ya. You never have any warning… But anyway, such is life, as you said.”
There’s an understated virtuosity to these tunes — a weightlessness that lifts the spirit even in their plaintive moments, often propelled by the percussive shuffle of dancer Nic Gareis, who taps his way across the album’s floorboards. O’Brien pays tribute to the experimentation that’s always thrived in the tradition, nodding to players like Nell Galvin and Packie Manus Byrne whose singular creative methods inspired his own development as a musician.
Much has been made of the Irish folk “renaissance” in recent years, and however you feel about the phraseology, this music’s presence on the world stage is undeniably more prominent than it’s been in decades. But as anyone in Lankum or The Mary Wallopers will tell you, the tradition was alive and kicking long before the rest of the world took interest, and Ultan O’Brien is a testament to that. Dancing The Line is the real deal — a proper knock you sideways record that gets right to the core of its culture while embracing its capacity to evolve and augment. Isn’t that what it’s all about at the end of the day?
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. For the most part, her vocals are muffled beyond comprehension, save for some ghostly mantras that in turn give tracks their titles — ‘seek you out’, ‘i look for you’, ‘hurt you’.
At points, like in the seven-minute standout ‘wasting’, her singing is like a keening lament, wailing over organ groans and skeletal percussion. Elsewhere, the reverb-soaked chord strums and wavering vocalisations of ‘sublime’ and ‘wrongways’ will prick the ears of Troth, Grouper, HTRK and Maria Somerville fans.
Amidst the gloom, Galtee Virtual Muse does gesture toward light at the end of its tunnel: a chiming autoharp cuts through the ambient fog of ‘in all your abstraction’, and you may well sense resolution in the wordless melody of ‘mounds’. It’s a faint glimmer buried in the crackling static, but sometimes that’s all you need to find your way back.
Roger Doyle - We Who Live Under Heaven [Nyahh Records]
When I spoke to the godfather of Irish electronic music Roger Doyle last year about ‘Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth’ — one of the best Irish pop songs of all time — he told me how, five decades into his career, he’s busier than ever. “I’m always finishing off work,” he said, building on a vast catalogue that’s encompassed musique concrète collages, space opera soundtracks, clanking synth experiments and much, much more.
We Who Live Under Heaven is his latest suite to take inspiration from the works of James Joyce, its title being derived from a phrase in Finnegans Wake. I’ve not read the book, so I can’t say whether or how this music relates to its notoriously difficult structure, but it does bear a similar sense of scale and avant-garde scope. Divided into six fragments, the title composition is a 40 minute body of digital organ drones, shimmery synthesis and clattering metallic percussion. There’s an intensity to the way each movement shifts into the next; this is no easy-going ambient exercise. It flows, sure, but there’s a devilish disregard for musical punctuation here that should keep you on your toes.
‘Debris Of Ice’ is equally gripping — a 19-minute excursion through orchestral synth swells, uncanny choral fragments and distorted drums. Doyle drew from his own archive for this, describing the piece as “freezing and in some cases fossilising some mostly old recordings”. The text in closing track ‘The Clouds Are Not Inaccessible’ comes from a letter written by Joyce's daughter Lucia to her psychiatrist in the 1930s. Spoken slowly by Mary Costelloe over a billowing drones and a downtempo beat, it reprises Doyle’s previous collections inspired by Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce’s confounding sentences slot themselves amongst his compositions.
All in all, it’s a work that only Doyle could pull off this convincingly, and it’s a thrill to hear him still pushing the boat out with his music so long into the game.
God Knows - The Art Of Alienation
It’s been eight years since Rusangano Family — the Limerick trio comprising MCs God Knows and MuRli and producer mynameisjOhn — won the Choice Music Prize for their album Let The Dead Bury The Dead. A landmark record that lit a fuse for a burgeoning South West hip-hop scene, it spliced its vibrant sampladelic beats with razor sharp lyricism on subjects including (but not limited to) cultural identity and the immigrant experience in Ireland. Listening back to it now, I’m struck dumb by how current it all still sounds a decade later.
Solo releases, scene-uniting collabs and the formation of the narolane collective with Denise Chaila followed over the next few years. For God Knows’ part, a mentoring role for young artists came naturally, but now, after some time away from the release cycle, he’s returned with a track of his own that taps into familiar themes, delivered with his trademark flow and a head-nodding beat from MuRli.
Inspired by OutKast’s ‘Da Art of Storytellin’’, the single documents the Zimbabwean-Irish artist’s arrival in his new hometown of Shannon in 2001, and the balancing act he grappled with while growing into his dual identity. It boasts some of his strongest lyrics in a long time, with references to faith and MTV Bass stitched around a snarled chorus — “Not gonna come this far just to crash” — that’ll stick to your brain alongside Danny Lanham’s electric guitar licks.
Apparently this is the first taste of more music to come this year from one of Ireland’s most reliably vital artists. At a time when the worst people imaginable are having their hate-filled rhetoric platformed on a national and international scale, to see a mic back in God Knows’ hands is a powerful thing indeed. He holds it like a sword.
Péist - Four
There’s a mad natural rock formation on the island of Inis Mór called Poll na bPéist, or “The Wormhole”. Carved into the limestone at the country’s most dramatic edge, the enormous rectangular pool is a sight to behold, but what’s equally impressive is the sound of the place — waves surge and roar amongst the merciless Atlantic wind in an all encompassing onslaught on the senses. It sucks you right in. It’s awesome.
This new album from Limerick experimental improv outfit Péist doesn’t sound anything like that — it’s much quieter — but the effect isn’t necessarily dissimilar. Lock into these strange, ultra-minimal, sorta jazzy collages and you just might find yourself totally immersed — trust me, I walked down a bustling South East London street the other day with it on and was disoriented. Recorded live at Ormston House in February last year, these nine performance fragments encompass crumbly electronics, purring saxophone, sampled piano, rustling percussion and a generous helping of static. Melodies fade in and out of focus, subsumed in crackling, gurgling, scratching textures; motifs come and go like glitchy checkpoints – a whirring brass spiral here, and bassy wub there, a quivering drone, a stray laugh in a yappy chorus of the word “Limerick”. It’s all good fun, provided you surrender yourself to the wormy weirdness of it all, which I really think you ought to.
Annie-dog - 15
Last year, Dublin’s Annie-dog made a splash with her debut single ‘The Pressures Of The Heart’, a slice of DIY indie-pop that meshed its heart-on-sleeve lyricism and fuzzy guitars with a glitching drum & bass beat. It’s a momentum she builds on with 15, a five-tracker that will work wonders for anyone currently 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 — whose namesake is lifted from a Smashing Pumpkins B-Side, and whose first release was praised by Billy Corgan himself — has a serious knack for a vocal hook and melody. ‘What Happened’ rides a crisp Y2K R&B beat with stuttering acoustic plucks and keys, her voice oscillating from a sweet-as-honey coo into an overdriven snarl and back again. The chorus of ‘Have I Been Living?’ has honestly been swirling around my head for weeks.
‘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 of someone who’s been doing this much longer with much more than the contents of a bedroom studio to hand. If this is what Annie-dog is doing this early on, it seems fair to assume we’ve got a lot to look forward to in future.
Ann Cleare, Crash Ensemble - TERRARIUM
If you’ve ever wondered what an environmental timelapse of the Irish midlands might sound like then wonder no more. Composer Ann Cleare and the reliably excellent Crash Ensemble manage to conjure just that on TERRARIUM, a 52-minute orchestral experiment that rumbles, jolts and heaves on a tectonic scale to imagine the landscape’s evolution over millennia, through ice ages and periods of topographical upheaval into spells of boggy stillness, industrial modernity and beyond.
It’s hard to say with certainty what sounds correspond to what geographical phenomena here — the fun is in trying to work it out as you listen. One can picture a cold, barren wasteland in the opening movement, where cymbals and strings scratch and scramble over a low frequency growl. Flurries of woodwind, flute, violin and viola burst into life like emergent vegetation; liquid gurgles prelude deep trombone groans. Some segments move slowly, glacially progressing with incidental creaks, plucks and melodic flourishes; at one point an instrument makes a sound almost like snoring, like a landscape amidst a spell of rest. Elsewhere, it teems with activity: what could be a swarm of locusts could also be perceived as the sound of a distant motorway, or an immense industrial operation. Thrilling passages collapse into moments of uneasy stillness, before the cycle repeats again in a different form.
I’m about as far as you can be from an expert on this sort of composition – or any type of composition for that matter lol – and the term “contemporary classical” so often leaves me cold, but music like this really does stimulate the senses in such a satisfying way when you give it a shot. Take it for a spin, lie back, and let your imagination run wild.
Quiet Music Ensemble - snow piled in a silver bowl [farpoint recordings]
Cork’s Quiet Music Ensemble lives up to its name here, exploring different shades of minimalism across five compositions by Kathy Hinde, Anna Murray, Christopher Fox, Rishin Singh and Susan Geaney. Encompassing everything from deep drones and sound art to abstract noise and slow orchestrations of strings, brass and woodwind, this music may be hushed, but for those in search of deep listening, it should speak volumes.
There’s a ship in a bottle precision and poise to these pieces — a sense that each note and seemingly incidental sound has been played with exacting intention. John Godfrey’s sustained electronic tones hum in Hinde’s ‘Acts of Balancing and Unbalancing’, flickering like candlelight as layers of burring trombone (Roddy O’Keeffe), creaking cello (Ilse De Ziah) and groaning double bass (Dan Bodwell) fold their way in and out of the mix.
Anna Murray’s ‘Aioi: leaves laden with words’ – a title derived from a classic piece of Japanese Noh theatre – is a collage of field recordings and Foley punctuated by fleeting instrumental bursts. Christopher Fox’s ‘qui/nt/et’ is an immersive drone bath that will delight fans of Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi, while moments of total silence only serve to amplify patient plucks and whirs of Rishin Singh’s ‘grisaille no.1’. Susan Geaney’s ‘Vacuum’ ends it all in a tectonic growl, with each player taking their instrument to its lowest frequency for a finishing move of earth-shifting tones and heaving textures.
t-woc - Scenes, Journeys & Colors [Rudimentary Records]
One might have assumed we were past the lockdown album era by now, but when Mick t-woc recently strolled past a boombox playing street soul on an Osaka pavement, he was inspired to finish a project that had begun during the pandemic. It’s a good thing he did, because Scenes, Journeys & Colors is really excellent: 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. A lo-fi funereal melody introduces the album over distorted swirls of dub FX as a voice remarks: “For me, life is about colour…”. ‘Lost In Thought’ rides a slinky beat and bassline through a few moods, from sun-dappled synth arp fantasy to a sci-fi western soundscape of Morricone-esque whistles and wriggly keys.
Swaggering downtempo highlight ‘Nova Yorky’ scratches the same itch for me as Salamanda’s In Parallel, while ‘Sky Curious’ is a clattering cosmic dub number complete with bittersweet cyborg vox. Punctuated by more abstract leftfield ambient cuts, it’s a treat. Place yourself next to the nearest window and drift away with it.
Better Living - A Love Always Wins [Long Gone]
I may be in the process of putting together a long piece about the history of Irish post-rock — bear with me on this one, life’s been busy lately — so it should come as no surprise that I really like this debut EP from London-Irish outfit Better Living. Featuring Ethan Begley Hughes — aka FWD-looking club music producer Glimmerman — on guitar, Josh Rosney on bass, Rachel Trench on violin and New Dad’s Fiachra Parslow on drums, the band’s two track introduction slots neatly into the genre’s quiet part / loud part canon, but there’s a level of detail and sincerity to it that lets it dodge any risk of feeling pastiche.
Both tracks — ‘A Love Always Wins’ and ‘Fiadh’ — are built around the same two-chord riff, with lush instrumental flourishes, electronics and field recordings guiding them through dynamic passages of pattering drums and shoegazing distortion. It’s quintessential stuff that’ll delight fans of God Is An Astronaut and early Mogwai, and a nice warm-up for a full-length album due later this year.
Also, side note, but while we’re on the subject of Irish instrumental bands, have you heard the new Adebisi Shank tune yet? We are, as they say, so back.
MMOTTORR - EP 1 [Intrinsic Rhythm]
Hardware aficionados New Jackson and Tr One join forces for what feels like a long overdue collaborative EP, fusing their shared specialisms in machine funk and American dance idioms across four revved up cuts recorded on the Kerry coast.
‘U LIKE IT RAW (‘RED HOT’)’ is a spicy electro number a lá Egyptian Lover, a vibe New Jackson (aka David Kitt) swung for with his vocoder on last year’s Oops!... Pop too. ‘RED EYE DRIVE’ and ‘WANNADO’ are a pair of Midwest acid scorchers that match Tr One’s (aka Eddie Reynolds) classic analogue prowess with Kitt’s flair for freneticism and woozy synth work. ‘HEADZ VOL.3’ keeps the TB-303 running and drum machines crunching nicely, but steers things down a deeper route for a moody finishing move. With more tunes on the way, EP 1 is a more than optimum introduction to a duo with no shortage of fuel in the tank.
Moving Still - Close To The Shams [Bordello A Parigi]
You’d be forgiven for thinking ‘Close To The Shams’, the title track from Jamal Sul’s latest EP as Moving Still, was written in the afterglow of a great party, or in the giddy anticipation of one on the immediate horizon. All the elements that make his music so irresistible are there: pumping drums, Hi-NRG and Italo bass arps, microtonal synth melodies drawn from disco classics of the SWANA region. But this track goes even bigger than his usual fare — trancey keys, snare rolls and funky breakbeats make for a deliciously gratuitous build-up before it all goes off like an oud-filled firework.
Turns out, as the Saudi-Irish DJ and producer explained in a recent video for Mixmag, the tune was composed under much chiller circumstances, while resting at home with his newborn daughter asleep on his chest. “I could feel her heart and mine almost syncing together,” he said, describing the track as a love letter to her life ahead and their shared cultural heritage, and an energetic embodiment of Irish dancefloors.
It’s a vibe he’s reliably captured across his catalogue — see last year’s Ouddy Bangers Vol.2 and Club Bizarre – and it's reflected across the rest of this EP too. ‘Zaman’ and ‘Bang Of Luban’ are two of the most ecstatic club tracks he’s ever released, while ‘Sunday Rollover (Suntop Mix)’ is warm and fuzzy-headed house pumper that could power anyone along the weary early-morning walk home – a smile on your face and the rising sun ever-so-slightly in your eyes.
Health Goth Wife - Proper Pleased in the Rosegarden [Moot Tapes]
Nostalgia in electronic music can sometimes feel quite sanitised — if I never hear a misty-eyed synth melody slapped on top of a breakbeat and some ‘90s rave samples again it’ll be too soon — so it’s refreshing to hear an album that trades the rose-tinted glasses for memories with a bit more dirt baked in. There’s a seshy crust all over these six tracks by Rob Mirolo’s Health Goth Wife, whose reference points for the release included “labyrinthine bayside housing estates, [getting] cider drunk acknowledging every individual leaf in the tree above your head, acrid herbs bought over the counter at Asha, [and] enough Amyllrightmate that you’re seeing cats for the rest of your life”.
Think breaks fight for their lives underneath snarling bass and acidic synth wriggles in ‘Nobody Does It Like My Brothers’. ‘I Can Feel Your Face’ is an explosion of Squarepusher-style drill ‘n’ bass, while ‘By Virtue of Existing’ and ‘I Would Do It All Again With The Same People’ stumble more toward Boards Of Canada — early Warp Records releases are another primary source of inspiration here. ‘Into Your Mirrored Hearing’ and ‘Where Did I Go When You Stopped’ tap into the feeling of “going bug eyed and yellow like a Simpson as the day breaks” with all the crunch of a ripped mix CD played through a shit speaker. Amidst the scuzz, there is still, somehow, a lovely fondness in these tracks, conveyed through woozy synths and the joyfully deranged craic of the whole thing. It’s a vomit n’ all tribute to misspent teenage nights and mornings spent “with your friends who are still your friends”, and another dusty jewel in the Moot Tapes crown.
Casper Hastings - Recreational Murder EP [Yin Yang]
Casper Hastings is a producer and DJ best known for techno; his EPs for imprints like Abnormal Vision and Sticky Ground are packed with bulldozing rhythms and twitchy loops tailored for pitch black dancefloors. So, his debut for Dublin’s Yin Yang Label is a bit of a diversion — a six-track sidestep into stripped-back electro and jungle that reworks his signature materials into something altogether more vibey.
The aggro title is a red herring; this is probably the mellowest music Hastings has ever committed to wax. ‘Tangerine Meme’ and ‘Reaper’ are mid-tempo Drexciyan detours cut with industrial echoes, acid bass gurgles and faint vocal snatches. ‘Ruthless Romance’ charges at a classic junglist clip, sure, but there’s a moodiness to it that feels more ‘Black Secret Technology’ than Metalheadz — its breaks cascade like hailstones through thick fog, crashing off the skylight while you’re cosied up inside.
It’s not like this is entirely new territory for Hastings — tracks like ‘Untitled 01’ and ‘Renegade Rizla’ have showcased his taste for hardcore contortions and Detroit-style Cybortonics — but it’s the first time these styles have felt fully in sync with his own palette. You can still sense his trademark toughness buried somewhere in these tunes, it’s just that those gritty motifs are now operating in gnarled harmony with smoother textures. But if something rougher round the edges is what you’re after, Peder Mannerfeldt has dished up a thundering remix of ‘Reaper’ to help scratch that itch.
That’s it for this month! Catch you next time.