New Irish Music: October 2024

With Silverbacks, Pippa Molony, RÓIS, Automatic Tasty and more

Hello!

I’m cutting to the chase this month for a couple of reasons. Mainly, the preamble I had planned on writing has grown legs and ended up a bit longer than anticipated, so I’ll be sharing it as a separate thing next week. It involves Top Of The Pops, Clannad, Enya, Intermission (2003), and a few loose inquiries into the ways we talk and write about these things. Will it have have the requisite Celtic soul, man? Who knows, but it’ll be fun.

There’s also just been an absurd amount of great new Irish music released over the past few weeks, and we could probably all do with a little break from “the news” I suppose, so let’s get right into it.

Eistigí.

Silverbacks - Easy Being A Winner [Central Tones]

Success is relative in indie-rock. For some, sure, it’s measured in sold out tours and six-figure streaming figures. For others, it’s some fun shows and half-decent Bandcamp sales. For Silverbacks, success is increasingly simple: you write a really fucking good record with your friends and family – say, an 11-tracker that references everyone from Stereolab, Rollerskate Skinny and Wilco to Yo La Tengo, Talking Heads and Thin Lizzy – and have a real nice time recording it. If people like it, all the better, but for this sextet, success is in the process. It’s a doing word that comes into play every time two, sometimes three, guitars tap into a razor-sharp harmony, an earworm vocal hook emerges, or your rhythm section locks into a motorik groove so tight it makes you want to run a half-marathon. 

Produced with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, the scattered members of Silverbacks convened in Stoneybatter’s Sonic Studios to record their third album. Lead singer and guitarist Daniel O’Kelly travelled over from the outskirts of Paris, where he lives with his wife, while his guitarist brother Kilian came in from Drogheda alongside his wife, the vocalist and keyboardist Emma Hanlon. Watch the mini-documentary they made about the recording sessions and you’ll see a band relaxed, happy to be hanging out and jamming through ideas. It’s this energy that you feel while listening to these songs, which let their riffs fire off in myriad directions, but never lose sight of their moreish indie-rock core. 

‘Selling Shovels’ sets out with an almost wild western acoustic rumble as O’Kelly deadpans about Wikipedia deep dives and weird encounters at NFT conferences, before it all stretches out into Neu-style psychedelia and stray heavy metal shreds. ‘Giving Away An Inch Of’, ‘Look At All You’ve Done’ and ‘Hideaway’ flit between swaggering indie pop a lá Leslie Feist, Nels Cline fret fuckery and Ira Kaplan-esque ruminations, but land somewhere that feels 100% Silverbacks. In ‘Something I Know’, Daniel and Kilian’s dad recites a poem and adds harmonised layers of clarinet to a Dots And Loops-style groove courtesy of drummer Gary Wickham and newly appointed bassist Paul Leamy, all underscoring Hanlon’s vocals and keys. The B-Side doesn’t lose momentum either, its intricacy and experimentation hiding in plain sight within the sheer catchiness of the songwriting. 

I guess it’s clear enough that I really like this record, but more than that, it’s just nice to see a band so comfortably hit their stride after a few years of false starts and misguided post-punk lumpings. Whatever comes next for Silverbacks, there’s a newfound ease to what they're doing that tells us they’ve already won. 

Pippa Molony - Hungry Ghost

Whenever I dream, there tends to be a train. I’m always desperate to get somewhere, racing through labyrinthine stations and missing stops before inevitably waking up a little disappointed, having never quite reached the place I was supposedly headed. It’s a peculiar feeling that Pippa Molony unpicks in Hungry Ghost, an eight-track avant-pop EP that deals in dreamstates, folklore and the intangible nature of longing for something you can’t easily define. “It’s about a feeling of being on the outside, looking in,” she says. “Always on the cusp of something, but never there.”

Like the cursed beings that give the release its title, the people we meet in these songs – produced mostly in collaboration with the reliably excellent Rory Sweeney – exist on the edge of reality: reaching, dissatisfied, dissociating. Over Local Gods’ gusting electronic drones in ‘You Dream Of Me’, Molony whispers from some liminal space – she is having visions, fragmenting, coming undone under some other world’s moonlight. In the sparsely accompanied title track and the droning ‘St. John’s’ – think Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch meets Replica-era OPN – characters return to once familiar places, but feel only uncanny disconnection.

Over the gossamer synth flutters in ‘Angels’, a woman longs to join the fairies who dance in a blue mirage outside her window, while Greg Tisdall’s glitching trills in ‘Falling’ underscore Molony’s mellifluous refrain. The subject of ‘A Woman Lies In Bed Asleep’ – with lyrics derived from Haruki Murakami’s After Dark – is described as being seen through a camera lens, captured in the realm between consciousness and unconsciousness. “She’s not looking at anything,” she sings over zither-like arps. “She’s probably not even dreaming.” 

Then there’s ‘Dream Rec 002’, a drowsy ambient yarn in which Molony and her companion encounter steep hills, cliffs and choppy waves before, predictably, missing their train. Maybe it’s the familiar theme, but this yawning recital feels central to this ambitious debut EP’s conceptual root system – a bittersweet surrealism that stretches into each track and leads you back toward its yearning core. Who says other people’s dreams are boring? 

RÓIS - MO L​É​AN

Fermanagh’s RÓIS revives the ancient art of keening, a lament for the dead in the Gaelic tradition, in this EP of spellbinding experimental pop and electronic dirges. Across five original songs and reworks punctuated by Angelus bell interludes, she intersperses her own vocals with rare recordings of this style, historically performed by bean chaointe, women who would wail and weep next to coffins at funeral wakes as facilitators of communal grief. With additional production from Lankum/ØXN’s John “Spud” Murphy and Belfast artist Tailtiu, MO L​É​AN reimagines this lost ritual, which was discouraged by the church from the mid 19th century onwards, and reminds us of the cathartic power of collective mourning, 

Inspired by singers such as Meredith Monk and Hatis Noit, RÓIS stretches and bends her voice to its limits in ‘WHAT DO YOU SAY’, assuming the role of a shrieking banshee over droning organ synths and gusts of distortion. In ‘CITÍ’, she duets as Gaeilge with one of the few authentic recordings of a keening song, performed by Donegal’s Cití ní Ghallchóir in 1951 and captured by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Its downtempo beat and shimmering keys carry through into ‘CAOINE’, which samples an unknown singer from the Aran islands recorded in 1955. 

The idea, RÓIS suggests, is to reappraise the wake, and the practice of keening within it, as a celebration of life, and a necessary embrace of sorrow. These were also occasions where matchmaking was common, a fact explored in the rapturous closing track ‘FEEL LOVE’, which ever so faintly echoes the Donna Summer disco anthem that (almost) shares its name. Her rendition of the methodist hymn ‘OH LOVELY APPEARANCE OF DEATH’ – which Berlin DJ Efdemin also included in his 2018 album New Atlantis – is a haunting ambient balm, while ‘THE DEATH NOTICES’ is a brief expression of death’s mundanity delivered in the form of a fabricated radio broadcast. It’s a wry remark on the acceptance of bereavement and grief as a part of life, a lesson that this EP, and the generations of bean chaointe that came before it, attempt to teach us through song. 

Fohn - Seanteach [Odda Recordings]

On his debut solo album, Tom Connolly – violinist with the Bristol post-rock outfit Quade – connects with his Connemara roots. With lush fiddle improvisations, field recordings and ambient electronics, Seanteach (meaning ‘old house’) manifests the island of Maighinis, where his paternal grandmother was born and raised, and which holds an “almost mythological space” in his memory from summers spent there as a child. 

Connolly’s bow paints in impressionistic strokes across eight compositions, his fiddle tilting toward the traditional without ever veering into pastiche. In places, his playing conjures the reverberant swoops of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, weaving elegantly through pump organ drones and soft tidal rhythms in ‘Immram’, before folding into layers of shoreline surf in ‘Tra’ and ‘MacDara’, which take its name from the patron saint of seafarers and fishermen, whose isolated island monastery could be seen across the water from Connolly’s grandmother’s homeplace on a clear day. 

In ‘Between The Shoreline And The Gorse’, his instrument mimics the chirruping birdsong it mingles with, before resonant legato spirals summon images of a wild horizon in the distance. The hallucinatory plucks, jolts and passages of ‘Aisling at Sea’ recall the likes of Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh and Eimear Reidy, whose 2022 album Things That Happened At Sea: A Short Story in Several Parts drew inspiration from an equally rugged coastal landscape in West Kerry. In ‘Closer’, we hear a woman’s voice beneath the strings and rustling recordings, muffled as though spoken in a dream. We don’t need to make out what she’s saying exactly, this is a personal project for Connolly after all, but the feeling it evokes could be familiar to anyone – of memory stretching beyond the individual and into one’s family history, a connection to a place you may never have lived, but which lives inside you regardless. 

V/A ‘Lebanon Fundraiser’ [Moot Tapes]

This new compilation from the Glasgow-via-Kilkenny label Moot Tapes starts with a reminder: the horrors we are watching unfold in Gaza and Lebanon at the hands of Israel did not begin a year ago. Over an ambient electronic composition by the Irish artist Dáithí Ó Sion​á​in, a July 2023 interview with Berlin-based Palestinian writer and researcher Marwa Fatafta lays out the stark realities of life under occupation and as an immigrant in Germany, of fighting for one’s existence and the right to self-determination, and of the ongoing complicity of western governments in aiding and abetting war crimes, ethnic cleansing and erasure. Following the label’s Gaza Relief Fund EP from October last year, all proceeds from this one are going toward Le Secours Populaire Libanais, who are providing medical attention, food and shelter to wounded and displaced people in Lebanon.

The subsequent 19 tracks are as high-grade as you might expect from the Moot Tapes cohort, with varying shades of ambient, drone and field recordings coming from imprint affiliates like Flowers At Night, Linda Buckley, Muireann Levis and Declan Synnott. There’s also a gorgeous acoustic guitar rendition of ‘Shenandoah’ (a traditional American folk tune that Liam Clancy does best imo) from Shovel Dance Collective's Daniel S. Evans, and dubby electronics from Sunken Foal and co-founder Neil Quigley, whose respective recent albums I reviewed last month. Essential listening for an essential cause. 

Automatic Tasty - One Foot in the Rave

Jonny Dillon returns to the acid pastures of his Automatic Tasty alias for the first time since 2020, unearthing eight cuts of domestic electro and cosy machine funk. The album’s title feels apposite: arriving a year after his second suite of American primitive acoustic instrumentals, and the winding down of his long-time label home Lunar Disko, the dancefloor may feel further than ever from the Wicklow musician’s orbit, but his battered old synths still bear the buzzy residue of raves gone by, and emit their afterglow here in soft, sentimental hues.

There’s a Lifestyles of the Laptop Café-style throb to ‘Forest Floor’ – an easy-going accompaniment to your next living room bop, dimly lit with wavering synths and the gentle patter of rain. It’s a vibe that lingers in ‘Big Bag Of Imaginary Cans With The Imaginary Lads’, before ‘Ringfort’ steps into the garden for a breath of breezy downtempo embellished with birdsong. While he does bounce back to the club zone now and then - with the acid breakbeats of ‘Raymond Tuesday’s Big Day Out’ and the Detroit-style schematics of ‘The Apocalypse Is Now!’ – by the time ‘Love's The Only Thing Gonna Make It Out Of This World Alive’ comes along with its koto-like keys and modulated echoes of a child at play, you get the sense that this laid-back rhythm is one that Dillon has nestled into quite comfortably, and his machines are more than happy to match his pace.

Ahmed, With Love - COMMA, FULLSTOP.

Dublin-born Sierra Leonean rapper Ahmed, With Love. follows his appearances on Carlos Danger’s Irish Hash Mafia – which I wrote about here – with a seriously impressive debut mixtape inspired by Brazilian music. Splicing bossa nova, tropicalia and samba with sampladelic hip-hop beats, a cast of producers including Rory Sweeney, POSER, owin, cawhul and lod underscore his verses, which veer about with a lightness of touch over an eminently repeatable 25 minutes.

There’s an irresistible magnetism to lead single, ‘WHATCHIMACALLIT.’, in which Ahmed’s easy-going flow switches into playful braggadocio over an elegant trap beat drenched in sub-bass, strings, flutes and mallet percussion: “Went to college for pharmacy too, so I can make songs and be cool. Dr Dre never worked in a clinic!” We drift into lovesick samba in the chameleon-featuring ‘World Cup!’, before ‘Help wanted.’ unpicks everyday anxiety over lo-fi fuzz and a guest verse from Curtisy. 

Ahmed makes some additional stops on his route to São Paulo, stepping into glitching neo soul in ‘Speak in tongues.’ before ‘Oxymoron.’ syphons Japanese jazz into laid-back rap swagger and ‘Georgian Flip.’ puts a rowdy spin on a traditional folk melody. No matter where he moves on the map though, his destination is always in sight, with a collage of TV samples holding it all together before an acoustic bossa duet with his friend Eduardo, ‘Até Logo…’, leads us to a sweet and soulful fullstop. 

Tr One - Is This The End [Intrinsic Rhythm]

It’s easy to despair at the state of dance music in 2024, but for Tr One, taking part in the industry circus has never been the point. His machines are tuned to the source, hardwired to cut through the bullshit as they chart their course from Carlow to Detroit. As ever, the latest EP on his Intrinsic Rhythm label pulls into some time-honoured stylistic lay-bys along this route, dipping into star-gazing early ‘90s techno in ‘Conversion’ and soulful Rhodes-fueled house in ‘Sunrise On Juliet’. 

‘Steroid’ is the sort of analog house jam I could listen to on loop for hours on end, its deceptively quick beat skipping amongst the deep acid crunch and sweet melancholy pads. Trace a line from Pépé Bradock, Pender Street Steppers’ Life In The Zone and Linkwood’s Expressions toward Theo Parrish, Omar S and Marcellus Pittman’s short-lived TOM Project and you’ll land in its nocturnal landscape. ‘Phone Voice’ occupies similarly dreamy terrain, with a pacey 909 underscoring its muffled keys and compressed bassline. 

The emotional acid thumper ‘Is This Love’ samples Scarlett Johansson's monologue from the sci-fi romance Her, in which her character, a virtual AI-powered assistant called Samantha, opts to stop over-intellectualising her love for Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore, and just trust the feeling. You get the sense that it’s a sentiment Tr One is trying to get back to in his own relationship with house music too. Upon announcing this release, he confessed that it may be his last solo EP for some time, with creative block and frustrations with the promotional side of music taking their toll on his love for the process. It’s an all-too-familiar feeling, but if stepping away from the hamster wheel, removing the pressure, and taking time to reconnect with the heart of the thing helps him make more tunes like this in the future, then so be it. 

Moving Still - Ouddy Bangers Vol. 2

Ouddy is a term coined by the Jeddah-born, Dublin-based DJ and producer Jamal Sul, aka Moving Still, to describe the intended effect of his hi-NRG edits from the SWANA region. As he explained in a recent video, oud, often referred to as liquid gold, is a rich and earthy fragrance that symbolises “spirituality, hospitality, luxury and cultural heritage” and is synonymous with “love, well-being, and that warm, welcoming vibe”. He free pours this feeling in ‘Ouddy Bangers Vol. 2’, a four-track EP that puts an irresistible spin on classic pop and disco tracks from Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco. 

On the A-Side, Sonia Salama’s late ‘80s anthem ‘Khatar’ and Lebanese singer Luna Badran’s ‘Feen’ get a kick-powered boost from Sul’s drum machines and trademark bass arps, their rousing vocals revitalised for modern dancefloors. (You need only turn to his Boiler Room to see the absolute rapture this stuff can stir up in a club).

Egyptian singer and actor Talaat Zein’s ‘Yallah’ is treated to an acid disco refresh and some additional dabke claps on the B-Side, before the tempo is taken up a notch for a high-drama finishing track. Technically speaking, Sul is slowing down Moroccan Raï singer Cheb Rizki's ‘Rou7 Salehha’ here, but with trancey synth chops, extravagant strings, driving drums and, of course, a fat arpeggiated bassline, it becomes a limb-swinging peak-time pumper, tailor made for maximum impact. Put simply, it’s pure liquid gold for your ear holes. 

Robert Curgenven - AGENESIS

The last time I checked in on the Cork-based Australian musician Robert Curgenven, he’d just released an album of immense church organ drones fed through an enormous dub sound system. It blew my head off at the time, and seemingly served as an apt primer for his latest LP, which once again uses sub-bass as its welding flame, melting field recordings, orchestral samples, techno throbs and grindcore glitches onto its thundering chassis.

Derived from a live light and sound show produced with his partner, the artist Kat McDowall, you can easily visualise the hallucinatory swirl of colours and shadows that would accompany the low-end physicality of this music. What begins with a Basinski-style disintegration of ‘Clair De Lune’ played on muffled brass is soon subsumed in rib-rattling sustain; wavering feedback swells and swells before collapsing under its own weight, leaving only the buzz of static and environmental audio. Pipe organs once again make an appearance, of course, as the billowing tones of Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork interact with those from Kylemore Abbey in Connemara. 

If you’re a fan of this newsletter, you’ll likely already know that I’m obsessed with the idea of the drone as a connective tissue between traditional music and contemporary experimentation, and between cultures across the globe. You can read the whole essay I wrote about it here. Few in Ireland exemplify this idea quite like Curgenven, so stick your headphones on and sink deep into these fat tectonic frequencies. 

Niwel Tsumbu - Milimo [Diatribe Records]

Over the past two decades, the Kinshasa-born, Greystones-based guitarist Niwel Tsumbu has toured the world, shared stages with Sinead O’Connor and Buena Vista Social Club, collaborated with Loah, Roger Doyle and percussionist Eamon Cagney, and performed for President Michael D. Higgins more than once. With a virtuosic style encompassing jazz, classical, flamenco, soukous and rhumba, he’s released multiple albums with accompanying musicians, but aside from a popular series of instructive videos on social media, no project has demonstrated his prowess as a soloist quite like Milimo.

Recorded in Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios last year, Tsumbu shreds his nylon-stringed extra limb across 13 tracks of (mostly) original material, from the Paco de Lucia-style ‘Rubato’ and ‘Gracias Paco’ to the beautiful Joe Pass jazz drifts of ‘Tirizah’. In the title track – which translates to mean ‘Spirits’ in Lingala – he sticks a piece of paper in the bridge of his guitar so it emulates the sound of a zande harp, the instrument on which he first composed and performed the tune while visiting his grandmother in Kinshasa some years ago. ‘Tears Of Joy’ taps into his taste for classical majesty, which he then blends with rhythms from his youth in ‘Afrique Moderne’. Everywhere, these stylistic fusions and technical flourishes are played off with elegance, as natural to him as breathing. 

The Deadlians - Rid The Land of Greedy Toads

Back in May, an all-star cast of musicians and singers was enlisted by The Pogues’ Spider Stacy to celebrate 40 years of their debut album Red Roses For Me on stage at the Hackney Empire, and to pay tribute to the late force of nature that was frontman Shane MacGowan, who died in November 2023. Alongside Lankum’s Daragh Lynch, Iona Zajac, Nadine Shah, John Francis Flynn, Junior Brother and others, was Dubliner Sean Fitzgerald, whose band, The Deadlians, played the opening slot, and who returned again later to play fiddle and sing the rowdy emigrant anthem ‘Muirshin Durkin’. 

Watching clips from the show, it’s clear that Fitzgerald was more than equipped to conjure MacGowan’s magnetism that night. It’s a restless spirit he channels into The Deadlians’ latest album too: a nine-track blast of Irish rock & roll that doesn’t sound like The Pogues per se, but taps into their unbridled folk punk energy nonetheless, imbuing it with psychedelic intensity (‘AI Captain Ignorance) and a splash of heavy metal (‘Jaws’). The way Fitzgerald snarls in ‘Secret Garden’ – “tarrrrmacadam” and “DANDELION” spat against Tommy Foster’s phased-out baritone guitar and Barry Semple’s galloping drums – evokes images of a feral street preacher, while ‘Return From Fingal / Lord Mayo’ transforms two traditional marching tunes into an instrumental shred sesh fused with fiddle and mandolin. 

‘A la Mode de France’ twists a 17th century satirical English dance into an all-out mosher, and although ‘Cheeky Monkey’ and closer ‘Go and Leave Me’ lean a little more Van Morrison than MacGowan in their lamenting balladry, their lack of polish is what makes them shine. Present as their forebears may seem though, The Deadlians are carving their own lane in the Irish music canon, letting rip in its punkiest extremities. 

Olive Hatake - BOYS NEED LOVE

The artwork for Olive Hatake’s second album depicts the Dublin producer and vocalist in a field at twilight, fastening his neon teal helmet as he gets ready to ride a dirt bike off into the sunset. It’s a fitting image to accompany BOYS NEED LOVE, a 15 track LP that filters revved-up breakbeats and vibrant melodies through a shimmering haze of sound collage, pop and R&B - his music swirls in a blur, like a technicolour dream played back in double speed.

To be fair, Hatake’s life has looked a bit like that lately too. In the two years since the release of his debut album, Life Of Colour, the Angolan-Irish artist has competed at the Jiu-Jitsu European championships in Paris, participated in the Superbooth producer’s conference in Berlin, rediscovered his faith, and reflected a lot on the nature of masculinity and his personal relationships. Written against this frenetic backdrop, these songs attempt to capture Hatake’s quieter, more introspective moments, his voice retaining a hushed sensitivity even as the beats race toward the dancefloor. In interludes that will resonate with fans of Voice Actor and L’Rain, sweet string arrangements weave around glitching environmental audio, while collaborations with the likes Jafaris, Ollie Fay, and Daryl Bengo lend to a sense that his creative community has kept him grounded, even in the midst of life’s relentless pace. 

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