New Irish Music: May 2026

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that there aren’t many Irish songs about heatwaves. To be honest, save for some deceptively sweet folk covers protesting nuclear war, and mostly incidental settings for lovelorn ruminations, summertime has rarely played more than a bit part in the island’s musical ecosystem.

Okay, okay, perhaps that’s not entirely true. After all, one of the oldest known songs in the Irish language, ‘Thugamar Féin an Samhradh Linn’, is literally all about the arrival of brighter days and nature’s flourishing. And who could ignore The Corrs’ recently revived pop classic ‘Summer Sunshine’, or Swimmers Jackson’s love letter to cans on the canal, ‘Summer’s Here’?

But even those songs bear a sort of melancholy at their core – an overcastness in their lyrical delivery. Sun-blushed anthems, in the classic sense at least, are hardly our strong suit, so we tend to let the music do the talking.

Sitting at my desk in London, where the temperature has scarcely gone below 32°C all week, I can sort of see why. Once the weather pivots from beer garden to slow boil, piecing together a coherent string of sentences about virtually anything becomes a slog. Nevertheless, I’ve been gathering up some recent, non-heatwave adjacent Irish releases for you to dig into below.

This edition of the New Irish Music round-up is a little different to the usual format. There’s slightly fewer releases than usual, and I’ve tried to keep the write-ups a bit shorter. There are a few reasons for this, and I think it’s how I’ll aim do things moving forward. For one thing, as I watched the list of albums, EPs and singles I wanted to cover expand over the past few weeks, I realised there’s often just too much to include in one monthly or bi-monthly dump. Plus, I want to feel able to write about a release and not wait until I’ve written about 20 more to share it.

So, the plan from here on is to do more regular, but shorter round-ups – maybe weekly, maybe bi-weekly, who knows. Either way, I’ll still covering as much stuff, just not all at once! There’ll be another batch coming in the next week or two, but in the meantime, there’s a bunch of great stuff below. Dive in, the water’s cold!

Eistigí.

Gilla Band - Giraffe [Rough Trade]

Gilla Band are back! Arriving alongside the announcement of an extensive run of tour dates, ‘Giraffe’ is the Dublin noiseniks first new material since 2022’s scorching Most Normal. It's mostly familiar fare – blistering guitar scuzz, clattering drums, a sub-crushing bassline, acerbic howls mixed with anxiety stream of consciousness lyricism – but it also feels almost… funky?

Perhaps boosted by guitarist Alan Duggan Borges’ Null Club project, a fresh glug of techno fuel has clearly been poured back into the Gilla Band tank, while the mid-section contains the closest thing they’ve had to a chord progression in years. They’ve always been great at subtly contorting their sound to splice in new ideas, but ‘Giraffe’ feels more like a perfectly scrambled concoction of everything they’ve done before, delivered with the confidence of a group more assured of who they are than ever.

Mel Keane - PIPEWORX [Deardogs]

Mel Keane’s last two albums teemed with life. Listening to the amphibious electro-acoustic sound design of 2021’s cult classic Frog of Earth and its sublime 2024 follow-up Airs, the feeling was frequently like that of an uncanny new world being born inside your headphones, a million filigreed particles glitching and glimmering into place like a summoning spell.

PIPEWORX is a much more minimal proposition, but no less enthralling. Born from his ongoing research into the marching pipe band traditions of Scotland, Ireland and other countries colonised by Britain, Keane extracts the instruments – bagpipes, snare drums – from their militaristic context to compose two cuts of transcendent Celtic futurism. On the 11-minute A-side, layers of droning chanter and electronics pulse and waver, at once mind-altering and melancholic.

On the B-side, contrapuntal arpeggios of muffled synth and harpsichord intertwine in mesmerising loops, hypnotic as a pendulum as the bagpipes and bassline swell beneath like an effervescent tide. At its peak, it’s punctuated by a run of brief snare drum stings, sending it all off into the ether, a universe apart from its martial roots, and all the more majestic for it.

As a bonus, it’s also well worth checking out the show Keane recorded with Deardogs label founder Stonesheet for Kiosk Radio. Amongst all sorts of ambient, experimental and contemporary classical goodies that fit into the PIPEWORX universe, you’ll find in there some unreleased material from fellow Princ€ss member and wherethetimegoes affiliate Sean Being. A signal of something new on the horizon? We can certainly hope so.

No You - No You [VP Texi]

Anois, Os Ard may be an Irish music newsletter, but this record is all about Los Angeles. No You is the debut collaborative album from Dubliner Davy Kehoe and California’s own Diego Herrera, aka Suzanne Kraft, two musicians whose wide-ranging experiments in janky club stuff, motorik synth-punk, dreamy ambience and bedroom pop have soundtracked hours upon hours of my life over the past decade or so.

After both relocating to LA in 2022, the pair started meeting for weekly home studio sessions, soldering their hardware to the smog to conjure 11 cuts of rough-hewn studio magic. From blown-out shoegaze and sun-baked ambient through scuzzy synth-pop and no wave jams, it stirs the duo’s individual specialties into a heady, hazy brew. Like the bastard child of Kehoe’s Wah Wah Wino classic Short Passing Game and Kraft’s sublime About You, it’s deceptively catchy, and another knockout for their respective catalogues.

Stephen Star - Newt [MirrorWorld]

Continuing MirrorWorld’s hot-streak after spellbinding turns from Nashpaints and famous tex, label co-founder Stephen Star’s Newt is an indie-folk jewel that feels made for slow Sunday mornings. As one half of “laptop soul” duo Bog Band – whose 2025 LP Mocashno Days oozed DIY pop romanticism – the Dubliner’s mellifluous vocals and flair for open-hearted lyricism are well established by now, but if that record referenced acts like Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile, this one drifts gently toward the fingerpicked loveliness of Nick Drake, Big Thief and Jim O’Rourke’s Drag City releases. Peppered with some dreamy ambient instrumentals and assists from the likes of Ellie O’Neill and Henry Earnest, it hits the soul like a sunbeam through your bedroom window.

For London-based readers, Star will be playing a free show alongside Atlantis DuBois on 9th June at the Below Stone Nest venue in Soho. Hosted by trinket, you can RSVP here.

BUKKY - ICEBERG

“I was sleeping on me, heaven is here and it’s me,” chimes BUKKY over a flickering club beat in ‘forget the rubbish (Gbagbe Oshi)’. “Pour libations on my acres, I’ve been trusting my maker.”

The opening track of the London-based Nigerian-Irish artist’s ICEBERG EP sets the tone for five tracks of genre-melting alt-pop, throughout which they tackle hard knocks and insecurities head-on to create a work of profound assurance. Across the release, they exorcise internal demons and banish external ops, all over a buffet of self-produced tracks that invoke everyone from Frank Ocean, Jai Paul and L’Rain to Joanne Robertson, KeiyaA and Nourished By Time.

From the frosty trip-hop balladry of ‘don’t tell them you suffer’ and the edge-burnt R&B of ‘WEST’, to the Durutti Column-like guitars and voice notes of ‘stranger in the west’, it’s a seriously impressive statement from an artist who seems bound for greatness.

Caitlin Orla Eve - Space, Weight, Colour (Origins)

When Caitlin Orla Eve was working on January’s Space, Weight Colour EP, she often found herself listening back to the abstract loops and sketches from which those songs were built. The West Cork musician and producer’s debut was certainly impressive – six tracks of pristinely dreamy electronic pop, all powdery beats and sweetly hushed vocals – but to my mind at least, this follow-up release of ambient reworks has a lot more going for it.

Stripping the songs down to their essence, weaving mirage-like echoes of voice through a pastel-hued haze of synth, sub-bass and sparse melodic fractals, helps their emotional resonances reveal themselves more naturally. These five compositions are subtle, but never at risk fading into the background. It’s a show-don’t-tell approach that serves Eve well, demonstrating her compositional nous without overcrowding the soundscape. As she writes herself in the Bandcamp notes, “Sometimes I think words fall short, and I felt like those parts already said everything by themselves”.

Goodtime John - Good As Gold

Marking 25 years of his Goodtime John moniker, Malmö-based Dubliner J. Cowhie – whose previous collaborators include Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Phil Elverum, and his unborn son’s heartbeat sampled from an ultrasound – trades his recent penchant for chilly synth textures for sun-dappled psychedelic pop. Throughout these 11 songs, he imbues breezy indie-rock and folk arrangements with warm kosmische flourishes a lá Ashra, Cluster and Harmonia, all underscoring hushed reflections on life’s undulating tides, and the ways we stay afloat on top of them.

V/A - Occupied Minds Vol.1 [Rudimentary Records]

Belfast’s Rudimentary Records gathers a strong cohort for this 18-track fundraiser for Palestine. Mostly comprising artists from the North of Ireland, the compilation moves from soft-focus ambient and downtempo electronics to experimental folk and full-throttle club stuff. Highlights come via The Cyclist’s pounding ‘Basslines For Palestine’ and Autumns’ industrial perc-stomper ‘Spit on a Dj for Therapy’, while Harry Hennessy and Róis’ cover of the early 20th century protest song ‘Bread and Roses’, popularised by Judy Collins and Pete Seeger, is sparkling and sublime.

It’s always a treat to hear a new song from Cork’s Elaine Howley, and her contribution, ‘My Sun, Your Sky’, is a gossamer light dream-pop gem hinged on a heart-tugging piano loop. And So I Watch You From Afar’s Rory Friers closes it all out with ‘To an end’, a gently rousing suite of orchestral strings, guitar and oh-so-soft electronics.

The album’s accompanying text cuts to the feeling and intention at the core of its music. “These are occupied minds: unsettled by injustice, tuned to resistance. This project has taken time, shaped slowly through conversations, contributions, and care. As headlines fade and media attention shifts, the suffering continues. It feels more important than ever to keep Palestine present in our collective consciousness, to resist silence, to resist forgetting.”

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!