New Irish Music: May 2025

A feast of DIY spontaneity, with releases from M(h)aol, Elaine Howley, Declan Synott, Natalia Beylis, Search Results, Rory Sweeney and more

Hello!

I’ll spare you the preamble this month, partly because this newsletter is already quite late, and partly because… Well, if there’s one thing the music covered below has taught me, it’s that sometimes it’s better to just get on with it.

Here you’ll find “spontaneous forest music” and Fluxus-style noise experiments. You’ll hear post-punk bands recalibrate in real time and unpolished organ drones with a restorative quality. There’s modular machine funk and full-pelt club cuts, surrealist improvisations and simply magical DIY dream pop tunes. In almost all of these releases, there’s a sense that overthinking is the enemy – explicitly or otherwise, they ask us to trust the process, follow the feeling where it leads, and create because you can.

Maybe I’m projecting, but it’s been painfully easy to feel cynical, furious and defeated lately. I don’t suppose you need me to tell you why – just open the news. And while it’s nowhere close to a solution, if nothing else, music that encourages intuition, independence and action might at least go some way to helping us keep going. Maybe? Who knows. You’ve just got to hope so.

Anyway, I hope you find something you like below. I’ll be back in early July with a new round-up and it’s already looking absolutely stacked. In the meantime, be well, stay safe, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Eistigí.

M(h)aol - Something Soft [TULLE]

Something Soft, the second album from feminist post-punks M(h)aol, starts with a whisper. You might recognise the voice of drummer Constance Keane, whose featherlight dream pop as Fears wields an unflinching emotional weight, and who now steps into the role of lead singer and lyricist following the departure of Róisín Nic Ghearailt. In the opening bars of ‘Pursuit’, over an anxious bass pulse, she sketches with icy precision the sense of threat that so frequently follows women when walking home late at night. “Keys clutched in my hand. If I stand up straight will you think I’m a man?”

Distorted bass and guitar snarls over a mechanical beat as Keane’s incantatory refrain builds and builds from a dead-eyed monotone to a blood-curdling shriek: “I thought about it all. I thought the shoes I’m wearing would help me run away from you. Who are you anyway? Is it you?”

As opening statements go, it’s a scorcher, and it sets the tone for the rest of the record. Now operating as a trio – bassist Zoë Greenway left last year to focus on her film career – M(h)aol, completed by Sean Nolan (guitar) and Jamie Hyland (bass, vocals, production, mixing, mastering, cover art, the works) sound tighter and more assured than ever before here. Topics range from the loss of a beloved pet (‘I Miss My Dog’) to unsolicited messages from sleazy pricks (‘DM:AM’), each tackled with a knack for twitchy noise, propulsive drums and surging low-end, with additional bass coming courtesy of Sarah Deegan. It’ll play incredibly well with fans of Gilla Band, whose first album, Holding Hands With Jamie, was engineered and named after M(h)aol’s Hyland, and whose frontman Dara Kiely lends backing vocals to ‘Clementine’, the band’s debut single from 2015 which gets a blistering reprise here.

In ‘Snare’, Keane decries the bullshit misogynist questioning she’s historically gotten for playing drums – “It’s too masculine. Why not play something soft like piano or violin?” – while in closer ‘Coda’, Hyland and a pre-departure Greenway let their cathartic howls end it all in a purge of distortion. M(h)aol have faced some curveballs over the past few years, but if ever there was a case for ripping it up and piecing yourself back together again, it’s this.

Elaine Howley - Hold Me In A New Way [Modern Love]

Elaine Howley returns with two DIY dream pop gems, maintaining the lo-fi magic of 2022’s underground hit, The Distance Between The Heart And Mouth, and imbuing it with freshly distilled elegance – a quiet majesty that comes when you create something so special from such simple components.

A minimal bassline, a fluttering drum machine, keys that crackle and waver like a candle on the verge of burnout, there’s really not a whole lot to it, but it carries Howley’s vocals like smoke curling out from a wick. It’s a gentle refrain – “Hold me in a new way. Hold me in the shape of love. I've been feeling far away. Pent up.” – but there’s more in its intimacy than in so many songs ten times more showy.

On the B-Side, ‘CD’s’ casts a similar spell, but where the title track gestures to the stars, this one lures us toward a mysterious light in the fog, all crumbling FM synth motifs, dubbed-out echoes and Howley’s voice, arresting and tender all at once.

It’ll pair well with albums by Jabu, Voice Actor and Tirzah, and the influence of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan is never far from the surface, but if you’re keen to hear Howley belt it out a bit more, give the new single from The Altered Hours a whirl. ‘Lay There With You’ finds her back on home turf, duetting with Cathal Mac Gabhann on the yearning, bluesy first single from the psych-rock outfit’s self-titled third album.

Confirmation Getup - Style Time [Countersunk]

Dunk Murphy and Paul Morrin first met in secondary school, and have each spent the ensuing decades at the heart of Ireland’s electronic engine. The latter founded the Front End Synthetics label in 2000, specialising in local strains of electro and IDM – like early Warp Records with a Dublin accent. Regular AOA readers will be familiar with the former, whose prolific output spans electro-acoustic ambience, modular oddness, “algo-machine funk” and more. Surprisingly, despite their lasting camaraderie and collaborations on artwork, they’d never worked on music together in earnest until now. Style Time feels well worth the wait.

In a recent interview with The Thin Air, the duo gave a track-by-track rundown of the LP, describing how they sent audio sketches and demos to one another with a simple instruction to add “something, anything, the first thing that comes to mind” to them. Once they had a handful of tunes they were happy with, they met in Dunk’s studio and got to work on tidying it all up. With “minimal conversation and a lot of laughs” they finalised the eight tracks we have here – the fun they had making it oozes from every zap, clonk, arp, bass throb and beat.

Synthesised strings soften the downtempo scuzz of ‘Sour Smock’, while woozy chords cut through the sizzly electro groove of ‘Camisole Shunt’. The stuttering 808s of ‘Pantaloon Prince’ nod toward footwork, but are promptly soaked in stargazing chords that lift the whole thing off the ground. Morrin does an impersonation of his grand-aunt’s warbling in ‘Garter Belt Fandango’, which Dunk reverses, adds harmonies to and folds into his glitching Buchla jam. And on it goes – two Irish electronic lifers having a laugh in the studio, making modular magic as they go. What more could you ask for?

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.

By their own admission — in an interview with Zara Hedderman’s

The Bad Arts

— some of these tunes took a bit longer to cook through than their previous material, but that isn’t saying a whole lot. Sure, Jack Condon (vocals, drums), Fionn Brennan (vocals, guitar) and their recently-departed bassist Adam Hoban made some more tweaks here and there, introducing synths and a few trickier arrangements into the mix, but the spontaneity that’s been at the core of their process since day one still bursts from each pore of this record. It’s a first thought, best thought policy that fuels their songwriting sessions – a system that strikes while the iron is hot, and avoids overthinking at all costs. It’s music that’s intuitive, but not at the expense of knowing what it’s doing.

You might sense it in ‘I Was A Teenage Girlfriend’ – a flurry of snare rolls, snarling bass and belligerent chants – or the in-the-pocket indie expertise of ‘Nellypot’, ‘On My Planet’, ‘Amaray’, ‘I Come Out At Night’ and ‘Hidden Hand’. You might pick it up in the avalanche dance-punk cacophony of ‘Too Much Time’, or in the way ‘Mountaintop’ gradually collapses in on itself without losing focus. I could go on, but really, you’re as well to just jump in. Who knows what results await you?

Natalia Beylis - The Roots of the Mountain Ash Embrace The Stone II

Natalia Beylis devoted the entire B-Side of her 2024 album, Lost - For Annie, to the old stone sweathouses scattered around Co. Leitrim. After a 12-minute segment comprising interviews with participants in a heritage project unearthing the lore of these sauna-like structures, an excerpt from a longform pump organ piece wound down the record with a deep, rustling drone.

Here, Beylis shares the full 36-minute recording, made one evening after spending a day “staring up at the corbelled stones and imagining the power of these mysterious curative spaces”. Sitting at her old W. Doherty & Company organ, she slowly pushed air through its bellows, making minute adjustments and listening to the microtonal changes that occurred as she played. The result is a work of subtle immersion; as you sink into the wooden instrument’s wavering buzz you might sense a change in your own breathing, a meditative deceleration as your pulse aligns with its gentle creaks, groans and rattles. You might find your nervous system soothed, your mind loosened just a little.

It’s believed that these sweathouses were once places of healing and restoration, and perhaps that’s something this piece achieves too, all while illuminating the fascinating history of this unique local phenomenon.

Acid Granny - Our Husband [Unbend Leg Out]

Acid Granny have spent seven years wheeling their instrument-strewn shopping trolley around Dublin, playing guerilla-style street gigs that clatter at the intersection of surrealist improv theatre, mangled dance-punk, noise and hip-hop. Occasionally, the amorphous outfit find their way into a studio and attempt to capture the ramshackle frenzy of these performances on record. Who better to harness that energy than Oli Ryan? The Mayo man behind the absurdist avant-funk-jazz-rock-whatever-the-fuck troupe Tongue Bundle and the reliably odd Unbend Leg Out label brings out the best – read: strangest – side of Acid Granny here, coaxing their psychedelic sensibilities across seven tracks that are really, genuinely, also quite good.

Recorded and produced during sporadic sessions at ULO Studios, Phibsborough between 2021 and 2023, the release of Our Husband on tape is intended as a sort of deck clearer ahead of some new stuff on the way. (I’ve been reliably informed that the band thought they’d already released it, before realising they’d forgotten to). There’s a queasy romance to ‘I Know God’, in which a soulful mantra – “He’s the only number I have saved in my brain” – loops over a stumbling beat, groggy bassline and crackly electronic organ drones.

The stupid lyrical ad libs of ‘Throw Me In The Liffey’, ‘Don’t Torpedo Me Biden’ and ‘I’m A Massive Child’ work because… Look, I don’t know, they just do, okay? Imagine yourself incredibly stoned in your friend’s living room, mucking about with drum machines and keyboards, smiling from ear to ear as you spit random shit into a banjaxed microphone over scuzzy beats, bass throbs and melodies. That’s basically what this album feels like. But then it gets late, and you end up with ‘Raymond Babies’, the sound of a solitary figure far too waved at the controls, crafting skeletal rhythms and bubbling keyboard motifs that, depending on the state you're in, might sound like the most mesmerising thing in the world amongst the background chatter. Just don’t let the punky jolt of ‘The Holy Spirit Is Coming Inside Me’ rattle you too much, the carpet’s just been cleaned and the trolley needs to get back out on the street soon.

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

Dublin locals may also be familiar with the busking drummer Jason McNamara. He’s played alongside Acid Granny a few times, but his most frequent collaborator over the past 15 years has been the city itself. He lugs his kit about its bustling streets, sets up shop and lets rip. “The obvious [sounds] are the car horn, squeaky brakes or glass smashing,” he told the Dublin InQuirer a few years ago. “I’ll be mid-improvisation and lock into the sound of seagulls or roadworks and try playing in time with whatever they’re doing.”

So, this new one on the Squiggling label – a treasure trove of weird beats and DIY psychedelia I’d not dug into before – is something of a surprise. With guitarist Dave Moran in tow, 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 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 the new caroline record, Jim O’Rourke’s oeuvre and the Ryley Walker and Charles Rumback collaborative albums will feel right at home here. Load up the video and watch the sunlight slowly fade from behind the branches as they play; you might find all the noise around you dissipates, and the noise within you floats away for just a while.

Declan Synnott - Colloquialism

On 12th May, the visionary Japanese composer, theorist and multimedia artist Yasunao Tone died in Manhattan at the age of 90. In the weeks since, tributes have poured in for this influential figure of the Fluxus movement, whose radical “Anti-Music” concept produced pioneering works in noise and glitch. In a career spanning decades, he espoused principles of deviation, disrupting standards, techniques and the very “system of music itself” with an unrestricted view. Through scotch tape CD manipulations and modifications of digital technologies, he championed artforms of process over outcome, and mapped routes for a universe of experimental artists including Alva Noto, Mark Fell, Tim Hecker and Merzbow.

A look into Tone’s work could go some way toward untangling that of Cork’s Declan Synott, a practitioner of “noise, as opposed to music” whose new album comprises four 15-minute-ish tracks that rumble, burr and buzz at a similar frequency. Frankly, compared to some of Tone’s most extreme works, Colloquialism is a gong bath: its whirring drones, distorted gusts and static whips aren’t exactly tuneful, but it bears a deep, arrhythmic pulse that latches onto the brain and body once you let it. Sure, it might sound like the inside a malfunctioning TV and feel like a turbulent takeoff, but as any noise fan will tell you, that physicality and the fact it can be conjured is basically the whole point.

Like Tone, Synott seeks deviation. He produced the album quickly, and tried not to dwell too much on how it turned out. He was going to wait until the CDs were ready to release it, but didn’t really see the point. He chucked it up on YouTube with some homemade videos, but only so people would have something to look at that wasn’t their phone. As he explained in a Substack post announcing it, Colloquilism in this case is a verb: “Finding a language and phrasing in that which isn’t formal, isn’t always exactly correct but conveys its meaning anyway.”

It’s creation for creation’s sake, in defiance of structure and what qualifies as sense. It’s not easy listening , but that’s now how you know it’s a success.

Rory Sweeney - Entrance Places (ft. Saoirse Miller, Róis & Risteárd Ó hAodha)

Rory Sweeney reckons this is the best track he’s ever produced, which is a pretty big claim considering his output over the past 12 months. From assembling an all-star cast of rapper pals for a joyful ode to G-funk, Irish Hash Mafia, to collaborating with experimental pop artist Pippa Molony and club music mythmaker Sloucho, he’s not just been busy — he’s been dizzyingly consistent.

But it’s hard to argue with him here. The ingredients that make up ‘Entrance Places’ are simple enough – shoreside field recordings, melodious bells, keys from keening revivalist RÓIS and reverb-soaked vocals from Saoirse Miller – but there’s a subtle magic to the way Sweeney works with these sounds that turns it into a properly absorbing ambient pop jewel. On the bliss scale, it reaches for Julianna Barwick and Lyra Pramuk at their best, and truthfully, it doesn’t feel far off. By the time Risteárd Ó hAodha’s gorgeous piano outro drifts into the mix, you’ll be floating into its dreamstate surf, willing to be washed away in its blissful tide again and again and again.

Faoi Thalamh Records - Various Artists Vol. 3: Fáschoill

The word fáschoill describes a “continuous undergrowth” or a “joining of roots”. It’s an apt title for this new compilation from Faoi Thalamh Records, which illuminates the island’s underground electronic ecosystem across 10 tracks, fusing capillaries from each corner of the country into a buzzing, beating heart at the centre. For the most part, the focus here is on club music: Breen’s ‘Right Now’ is the sort of peak-time house pumper you’d hear in a ‘90s Ibiza montage; Roibí's 'EVRY1THINKSIMAB!TCH’ is a mix of sultry vocal bruk and Farben-esque microhouse. Supergross and MEJMI provide full-pelt techno, while Crispy Jason chases last year’s Shadowcon One with another slice of acid-soaked breakage.

Others, like Lighght and Heatsink, play with dancefloor conventions in the way a cat might play with a captured mouse. The latter’s ‘Fuck Em’ Up’ starts with a flurry of oscillating frequencies before a thundering beat lurches into the mix; the former’s ‘Mutator’ does exactly what its title suggests, its syncopated rhythms and warped zaps rolling round eachother in limb-swinging symbiosis.

Most striking of all though are the tracks that bookend this release. Bitten Twice affiliate E The Artist and KRAF swap hallucinatory howls and deadpan raps over squalls of distortion in ‘LINT’, while RÓIS, best known for her electronic reconfigurations of keening laments, employs a similar technique to Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi’s heart-shattering folk song ‘Naci en Palestina’, transforming it into a beautifully abstract evocation of grief. It reminds us that roots rarely stay lodged in one place for long — they stretch out in search of familiar nutrients, common ground, the stuff of life that connects us all.

Reasons To Dance - Sunroom002

The music released on Dublin’s Reasons To Dance label tends to pair nicely with its cover art. This new compilation is no different: a glowing orb floats in a small greenhouse at dusk, illuminating an old stone wall and the greenery surrounding it. It lures you in like something you’d stumble across mid-trip at a festival.

It’s a vibe that’s conjured across eight radiant club cuts, which emit neon-hued contrails as they dart between dancefloor idioms with zippy abandon. Into a blender assigned to Mossambi, VVS1, Lúnasa and Osc go glugs of dubstep, dembow and d&b, all whizzed up with squarewave synths and polychromatic paint until the lid flies off entirely. Label co-founder Fionn takes the iconic ‘Renegade Master’ sample and transforms it into a piece of blissed-out bruk, while co-head Dåser dirties up the buoyant grooves and featherlight melodies of ‘Few Chips’ with a nasty bass wobble.

Tracks by Brawni and Strict Face will work wonders for fans of the Wisdom Teeth extended universe, but really, this release dazzles entirely on its own merit, with more than enough sparkle to get you up off your seat and straight onto the nearest dancefloor.

Nwyvre - Pattern Collapse [Fort Evil Fruit]

You might know Nwyvre as one half of Whirling Hall Of Knives. Alongside The Last Sound’s Barry Murphy, he’s spent two decades dishing out pummelling tech-noise with side orders of blown-out kosmische, brain-baking shoegaze and fuzzy drone. On his latest effort for Fort Evil Fruit, he keeps the entremets to a minimum, splicing 12 one-take live jams into two continuous pieces for tape with a clear focus on beats. ‘Burn The Box’ warms the hardware with a giddy loading screen wriggle, before ‘Pattern Collapse’ gets the low-end cooking with a tweaked arrhythmic throb.

It starts to get serious around ‘Red Light’, a 10-minute techno bruiser that gallops and growls from the get-go and doesn’t let up. Elsewhere, there are disjointed electro sizzlers (‘Relay Tower 17 (Dead Air)’), icy IDM cuts (‘6th Mirror 9th Room’, ‘Air Ducts’), percussive club pounders (‘Bone Collapse’) and, you got it, more techno (‘Forget’, ‘Casual Replication Error’). Amidst all the rib-rattling distortion and pumelling rhythms, Nwyvre still manages to find beauty in the noise: the feedback shreds and glitching melodies of ‘Limewater’ wash over you like a wave, while ‘No Eye Witness’ sounds like a church organ on a cyborg planet – strange, mechanical, but still human.

I Dreamed I Dream - BOYOPOISONING

It feels apt to end this month’s noisy newsletter with a new one from I Dreamed I Dream, a Cork-based “no-punk bitch-wave” outfit who undeniably tap into the tropes of their musical forebears – they’re named after an early Sonic Youth tune after all – but introduce hooks, humour and an energy that’s all theirs. You might hear Hole or The Breeders in ‘Crawl’, but bassist Claire Aherne isn’t doing a Courtney Love or Kim Deal impression – she harnesses the power of their smoky snarls, sure, but she makes them her own.

‘Diana’ filters Irish mythology through a prism of ‘90s alt-rock and Isn’t Anything-era mbv, spinning lyrics about the swans of Lir into a story of lost love. ‘Fags’ trades the flute for a Korg and the bodhrán for a full kit to create a folk-influenced punk ballad that’ll sound as at home at trad session as it will in a sweaty basement. Aherne switches between English and Irish with sean-nós-ish inflections and pays tribute to, yeah, shmokin’ fags, but also “the push and pull of affection, the ache of loss, and the beauty of rediscovery.”

‘Heaven’ ends it all on a clattering no-wave tip. Drummer Julie Landers and guitarist Elle O’Leary let rip, while Niamh Hayes’ synths create disordanct atmospherics for visceral lyrics of faith, betrayal and fury. Under two years out from the debut single, I Dreamed I Dream are still finding their feet, but on BOYOPOISONING you can hear it all coming together. It makes whatever comes next seem like an incredibly exciting prospect.

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