New Irish Music: August 2025

Stitched into the patchwork of The Department of Energy’s new mixtape, Ambient Harvest, are pockets of Irish lore. Buried amongst the dew-soaked drones, rustling field recordings and eerie folk deconstructions that make up this 27-track dispatch from the late summer undergrowth, you’ll find spoken interludes that place the music in dialogue with something deeper – something rooted in history, mythology, and the mysterious landscape that flourishes between the two.

Recited by label founder Dan Callanan and the poet and DJ Reeta Cherie, these passages weave tales of ancient altars and druidic rituals through living traditions like the Puck Fair and extracts from The Schools’ Collection, an incredible initiative that, between 1937 and 1939, invited Irish children to document local life and folklore. Punctuating tracks by the likes of Spit Portrait, cosmo, Brownsauce, Lætitia, Deadman’s Ghost and Ian Nyquist – whose album of shapeshifting bodhrán experiments I’ll be reviewing properly next month – it all provides a sort of foundation for the sounds to latch onto and unravel from.

It helps shape and contextualise the compilation as it “delves into the dust and sweat of Ireland’s high summer”, extracting imagery and influence from “waterfalls, falling leaves, Fir Bolg, Ogham scripts, hay-making, scythes, sickles, honey, dancing, life-cycles, mischief, the rain, the sun and coastal cattle”.

Speaking about the release, which premiered on Cork’s recently launched independent radio station éist and comes paired with a 48-page zine, Callanan says: “Every artist responded to the brief in their own way – Jonathan Deasy and Susan Geaney’s ‘Torc’ arrived back in May and lit a fire in my head. The visual framework was already in place from various Celtic mythology books, my own analogue photography and the reliable Dúchas archive. There's a real joy in sequencing the tape as the pieces come in, finding where moods and ideas fit into each other – it really did feel like a very bountiful harvest. My compliments to all of the incredible artists who contributed the fruits of their labour and skill.”

Ambient Harvest is divided into four quarters, and the artist Megan Conery (Covers Blown) has now made an accompanying video for each seven-track segment. Follow The Department Of Energy to keep an eye out for those. What’s more, all proceeds after production costs for the compilation up to the end of this month will go to MASI, the advocacy group working for justice, freedom and dignity for all asylum seekers in Ireland.

This interplay of lore, music and the landscape has been on my mind a lot lately, not least because it’s a real recurring theme in the releases collected in this month’s New Irish Music round-up. Below you’ll find multiple albums that excavate inspiration from locations around the island’s countryside, from ancient cairns steeped in myth to extinct volcanic basins, mass rocks and quarries. Listen to some of these sounds in the right headspace and you might feel the vast expanse of deep time colliding with the present, converging into a great big jumble of geology, topography, folklore and, most importantly, properly immersive music.

Or at least that’s what I’ve felt, but I’ll admit, I’ve possibly let my thoughts get tangled up in this stuff a bit over the past month or so. Life’s been hectic, and I’ve been finding solace from the non-stopness of it all by watching John Moriarty clips on YouTube. His wild and beautiful meanderings on nature and spirituality take me out of everything for a bit, but inevitably feed back into my listening. If ever there was a guy who’d encourage you to get lost in search of something mystical in the Irish landscape it’d be him.

Anyway, all that aside, there’s tonnes of music to get stuck into here. It’s possibly worth noting that I’ve not reviewed CMAT’s Euro-Country, but I do just want to say here that I think it’s incredible and that she’s a true pop star who deserves the world. Her performance at the Green Man festival in Wales last month was possibly the musical highlight of my year so far, closely followed by Underworld, who played right after.

A quick note as ever to say thanks for reading Anois, Os Ard. If you like what I do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can keep it going and growing. It’s a lot of work to do this every month but I love it and would truly love to be able to do more. Even sharing it to help get it under people’s noses is a huge help.

Okay okay okay! Enough preamble. Dive in below!

Eistigí.

Poor Creature - All Smiles Tonight [River Lea Recordings]

For the members of Poor Creature, songs about loss are nothing new. In the vocal quartet Landless, Ruth Clinton wrings magic from old ballads steeped in longing and despair. In Lankum, fiddle player Cormac Mac Diarmada and drummer John Dermody bring melody, tension and heft to earth-moving doom laments. Even Dermody’s old band, the apocalyptic kosmische ensemble The Jimmy Cake, conjured lost possibilities in instrumental records like ‘Dublin Gone, Everybody Dead’ and ‘This Used To Be The Future’.

You can sense all of this in All Smiles Tonight, a collection of eight songs assembled from an array of eras and stylistic sources, but which coalesce here under a gorgeous experimental folk umbrella. The trio cast a wide net, reimagining trad, bluegrass and country tunes with splashes of dream-pop, shoegaze and droning psychedelia.

‘Adieu Lovely Erin’ tells the story of the 19th century Belfast forger exiled to Australia, but you don’t have to be a convict for its sense of yearning to resonate through its organ drones and slow krautrock groove. It’s a feeling that lingers in the stunning ‘Bury Me Not’, a song first written in 1839 that tells of a sailor’s dying wish, recalibrated here with echoes of different renditions – including a cowboy country version that trades the deep blue sea for the lone prairie – and Clinton’s spellbinding vocals.

‘The Whole Town Knows’ transforms Ray Lynam and Philomena Begley’s “country and Irish” confession to romantic infidelity into a climate change elegy, Clinton and Mac Diarmada duetting over a dirging instrumental that still bears a certain twang – an Anthropocene line dance toward doomsday. The latter goes solo on ‘Lorene’, reprising the tenderness and heartache that made ‘Lord Abore and Mary Flynn’ such a standout in False Lankum. You’ll sense the immensity of John “Spud” Murphy’s production in ‘Hick’s Farewell’ and 2025’s second cover of ‘An Draighneán Donn’ – after lullahush’s – which immerses its lovelorn lyrics in a tidal wave of theremin, organ and strings. Clinton’s Hohner Organetta leads the title track, reprogramming the country standard first popularised in Ireland by The Chieftains into a bittersweet waltz before 10-minute closer ‘Willie-o’ ends things with a visit from a dead lover. The pining ballad builds slowly, letting its aching drones simmer and sink under the skin without ever reaching a dramatic peak. Like a ghost, its presence will linger in the mind long after it’s finished playing.

Michael Lightborne - Dormant Volcanoes of Ireland [Gleo Records]

Michael Lightborne tunnels into Irish psychogeography on this debut release for Limerick’s Gleo Records. Across six tracks of tectonic drones and slow-surging rhythms – plus an accompanying zine of illustrations, images and text – the Cork and Birmingham-based artist opens up the vents and crevices of our deep collective consciousness. Unearthing veins of Fomorian blood and epochs of mythological occupation and volcanic activity, we’re invited to navigate notions of post-colonial trauma, climate change and our complicated relationship with the land itself.

It’s seismic stuff, too dense to get properly into here, but dig into the underground tributaries this LP uncovers and find a million more to explore, from alternate readings of the Leabhar Gabhála Éireann, through mystical passages in John Moriarty’s Dreamtime, to the fact there are actually no dormant volcanoes in Ireland at all, only extinct ones.

Most of the tracks here are named after one of these. In ‘Underworld / Limerick Volcanic Basin’, Mama Matrix’s ghostly vocals glitch over a combustible footwork-like beat. In ‘Bog Bodies / Brí Éile’, Lorenzo Prati’s saxophone purrs softly over stormy field recordings. You can practically feel the cascading plumes of white-hot ash in the rhythmic atmospheres of ‘Pyroclastic Flows / Horse’s Den’, before ‘Rhyolites and Tuffs / Killeen’ and ‘Magma / Lambay Island’ knot accordion contortions into something sublime. ‘Tektites / An tOileán Rua’ takes its name from the impact glass that’s formed when a meteorite melts terrestrial rock and ejects molten debris into the atmosphere; this closing track’s music is decidedly less volatile, but its deep ambient swells encompass a similar sense of enormity, of something borne of materials from beyond this planet, crashing down to become one with its very crust. It gestures toward the earth’s core and finds infinity.

White Sage - Queen Maeve’s Grave [Little Gem Records]

At the summit of Knocknarea – a prominent limestone hill to the west of Sligo town – sits Miosgán Meadhbha, or Maeve's Heap, a large, unexcavated cairn that’s believed to contain a neolithic passage tomb. The Meadhbh/Maeve in question is Medb, queen of Connacht in Irish mythology, who is sometimes said to be buried there, upright with her spear pointed toward her enemies in Ulster. Archaeologists have seemingly relegated this story to legend, but that hardly removes the magic that one feels when gazing at this mysterious mound of rock.

Folklore also tells us that passage tombs were gateways to the Otherworld, dwelling of the supernatural Tuatha Dé Danann, so it’s no wonder this site inspired Andy Walsh, aka White Sage, a producer of “experimental spacewave for astral projecting yourself to the surface of other realms, within and without”. The A-Side of his new album consists entirely of recordings from a live set he played at Graceland in Sligo in 2023; the shuffle and faint chatter of the venue gives life to his ambient electronics, languid basslines and woodwind.

Opener ‘Knock Knocknarea’ drifts on a bed of twinkly old piano keys, before warbling Hohner Blokflote and sampled vocal yodels lend it a sense of ritual and raw sweetness. The title track actually features a live recording from earlier that same day, when Walsh played his alto sax at the foot of Medb’s mound. At the gig, he accompanied his past self on the bass for a slice of jazzy psychedelia, before launching further toward the cosmos with ‘Stone In The Ditch’.

‘Stars In Broad Daylight’ starts the B-Side with a beautiful electone organ jam, augmented with woozy effects and tape manipulation. The rest of the album follows suit with a series of raw performance recordings captured in the Dublin mountains, the Phoenix Park bandstand, and the Anseo venue where he is a promoter. A lovely document of live psych experimentation, and a reminder that you can really find this stuff anywhere once you know where to look.

Mícheál Keating - TÍRDHREACHA BEO / LIVE LANDSCAPES [Hlym Records]

As a collaborator, Micheál Keating has made pristine indie-pop with Bleeding Heart Pigeons, explosive post-rock with Brendan McInerney, ultra-minimal improv with Péist, and emotive folk and slowcore with Laura Duff and The Low Field. On this first project released under his own name, however, the prolific Limerick musician, producer and multimedia artist’s sole companion is the landscape itself.

Armed only with a pair of LOM basicUcho microphones, a Zoom F3 recorder, and a laptop loaded with Max/MSP for live signal processing, Keating spent two years exploring various rural locations around his home county, improvising with the sounds he captured in real time. The result is an 18-track travelogue of crackling field recordings, buzzing ambient frequencies and faint, wordless singing. I love how tactile this music is: listening to it on the couch in my London flat, I can practically feel the rustling grass and reeds brushing against my skin, the wind pelting my face, the rain bouncing off my back.

It’s a project that encourages deep, considered listening, but it’s not meant as some romanticised portrayal of untapped nature. Search the locations listed on its tracklist – or take in the photos of its accompanying book and exhibition – and you’ll quickly realise that human interference and industry are never far. For every bog, river, cave, mass rock and holy well, there is an abandoned quarry, a cell tower on a hill, an old railway. With every birdsong glitch, every breeze bent into a metallic drone, every ghostly vocalisation, and every cow’s moo morphed into a distorted gust, we’re invited to consider our own inescapable presence, and all that may entail.

Rún - Rún [Rocket Recordings]

When I wrote about the drone in Irish music last year, I tried to convey sustained tones as a sort of connective tissue: a shared language across genres, cultures and generations; a unifying force amongst folk practitioners, contemporary experimenters and countless others in between.

No Irish album released this year has captured this idea quite like Rún’s debut. The trio’s heady brew of burnt-out folk, doom metal and dub psychedelia blew my head off at Supersonic Festival a few weeks ago, so it's no surprise that these seven tracks are doing the same now. Comprising experimental musician and filmmaker Tara Baoth Mooney on vocals and synths, Nurse With Wound collaborator and ex-Jimmy Caker Diarmuid MacDiarmada on bass, and Solar Bear turned studio extraordinaire Rian Trench on drums and production, it’s a project that brims with experience as much as it does with sheer intuitive alchemy. As they put it: “We often engineer particular atmospheres in order to bring ourselves to what we call the ‘deep’ place, this is the ‘finding’ phase of the process, where ideas come together with whatever stuff is in the ether.”

You’ll hear all this in ‘Paidir Pobal (Pupil)’, which erupts from a folk lullaby into a pure doom ritual a lá Big Brave, complete with a mesmeric incantation that’ll stick in your mind. ‘Terror Moon’ and ‘Strike it’ confront manifestations of human callousness and cruelty – from Tuam to Palestine – through prisms of visceral sludge punk and acid-soaked metal. ‘Such Is The Kingdom’ and ‘Caoineadh’ maintain that intensity while venturing further into the cosmic ooze. The latter ends things with a lysergic 13-minute trip into sean-nós psych spiritualism. Like a banshee’s howl beckoning from a black hole, it invites us into the drone’s all-consuming embrace, before imploding into a cloud of aetherial fuzz.

Jellypelt - Lasmuigh [Moot Tapes]

Dáithí Ó Sionáin’s music as Jellypelt doesn’t evoke today’s dancefloors as much as it does memories of dances long past. Like watching ripped VHS videos of raves on YouTube, you can certainly sense the ecstasy and energy in the Kilkenny artist’s tracks, but there’s a bittersweet sense of something vanished in them too. The kicks are just that little bit softer; the synth melodies and vocal snippets flicker and glitch like ghosts of blissed-out nights spent misbehaving with friends you haven’t heard from in years.

Or, at least, that’s the vibe I’ve projected onto Lasmuigh, the follow-up to Ó Sionáin’s 2021 album 2127 Tanya. Like a lost jewel of the acid house era, these ten tracks bear echoes of 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald in their DNA, but stand on their own two feet with era-sweeping flourishes of breakbeat, IDM, Emeralds-esque ambient and post-dubstep a lá Jacques Greene.

There’s something of ‘Hyph Mngo’ in the euphoric ‘Friend Request’; you could shed a tear listening to ‘Gesplitter ' or ‘Zoya K’ in the glow of a post-party stroll home; ‘Mit Bübbles’ and ‘Qassem’ mix syncopated beats with gorgeous synths, with the former featuring a sweet earworm vocal and the latter paying tribute to the Palestinian doctor Qassem Masri and every medic saving lives under unimaginable conditions amidst Israel’s depraved genocide in Gaza.

Of course, some of Lasmuigh will sound great in a club. ‘Roberto Baggio’ is a luminous house pumper with an oh-so-satisfying synth arpeggio, while closer ‘Trans-Ireland Express’ could surely send ravers out into the dawn with hearts full and eyes wide. It’s music that conjures overly sentimental visions of dancing through the night – feelings that can seem scarce or skewed in the culture’s current climate, or which simply end up relegated to memory as we age. Rose tinted as they may be, isn’t it nice just to live in that sensation for a bit?

David Donohoe and Kate Carr - A Storm and its Aftermath

For most of us, a storm is defined by its deluges and gales; we tend to imagine ominous clouds, lightning flashes, thunder cracks and crashing waves. When sound artists David Donohoe and Kate Carr came together on Sherkin Island for a collaborative performance in St. Mona’s Church as part of Open Ear 2024, they focused less on these peaks, and more on what comes before and after. As Carr enquired in an interview with The Quietus before the festival: “What sounds build in intensity towards the breaking of the storm? What sounds become less prevalent as the storm approaches? And then similarly, after the storm – what sounds fade away and what sounds come back?”

With a mix of field recordings, bird horns, synthesis, live percussion and materials gathered from the island itself – stone slabs, dried grass, seaweed – the pair explored this idea first in a live setting, before later recording the 45-minute composition we have here. In a work of patient soundscaping, you’ll hear metallic drones and static fuzz mimic the comings and goings of gusts; you’ll notice birds and bleating sheep fade in and out the mix as the swish, rattle and patter of rain incrementally increases. Gongs and thuds summon breaking waves and rumbles of thunder that only arrive toward the track’s end, before fading again as the animals return. A rippling chime of sunlight breaks through the remaining drizzle in the closing moments; I can almost smell the petrichor coming off the ground, and feel the sea air rushing into my lungs. It’s a feeling almost like relief – for the storm having passed for now, but equally having been there to hear it in the first place.

Autumns - Basic Face [Dummy Hand]

On a Sherkin Island beach this summer, Derry’s Christian Donaghey, aka Autumns, and Bristol’s Kahn rigged up a sound system and let rip on the attendees of Open Ear. With a raucous live set of industrial dub, EBM and post-punk-scorched techno, they delivered what was by all accounts a standout performance in a weekend that was full of them.

For those of us unfortunate enough not to have been there, Donaghey’s been kind enough to continue his prolific release streak with Basic Face. This new eight-tracker for Bristol’s Dummy Hand follows last year’s fantastic Dyslexia Sound Source – which I wrote about here – and features some of his most overtly club-focused material to date.

Tracks like ‘Your Favourite Cowboy’ and ‘Another Vape On The Ground’ clatter and thump with metallic techno swagger a lá Broken English Club; ‘How Long Does It Take For A Nose To Rot’ sounds like a cold wave cover of The Knife’s ‘Heartbeats’; the drums and acid squelches in ‘Bog Bodies’ and ‘White Walls’ thunder and clack like the best Factory Floor tracks, Donaghey’s distorted and delayed vocals swerving through the mix like a ghost getting sucked into a hoover. It’s proper ceiling-smacking, limb-swinging stuff that more than makes up for the Sherkin FOMO.

Negro Impacto - TV DREAMS

California has Tyler, Frank Ocean and Steve Lacy, Richmond has D’Angelo and DJ Harrison, New Jersey has Lauryn Hill, Dallas has Erykah Badu, and Dundalk has Negro Impacto. The alternative R&B and neo-soul duo are back with their first EP in four years and it’s well worth the wait. Here’s a soundtrack to late summer evenings and early mornings, wandering home in the dusky afterglow or heading out into the light of a new day.

Across these five tracks, Laurence "StrangeLove" Kapinga and Chi-chi Enyoazu spin a rich soundworld of honeyed vocals, jangly guitars and breezy grooves. You might hear something of L’Rain’s soulful psychedelia in opener ‘SEESAW’, before ‘1800’ rollerskates down a sunny promenade to find the sweet spot between The Internet, Mac Demarco and Joviale. Really though, they have their own thing going on, and it feels like a breath of fresh air on a hot day.

‘BLUE’ is a slice of sensual soul with a sampled spoken bridge about the Irish language’s use of duine gorm (blue person) to refer to Black people. ‘FANGIRL’ is a loved-up R&B anthem complete with some divine keys and a satisfyingly shreddy guitar solo. ‘NWANNE’ – the Igbo word for “sibling” – is a simply gorgeous closer, all muffled percussion and acoustic guitars cut with homespun samples and guest vocals from friends and family. It all feels quite special, at once an arrival and the first step toward something even bigger.

Adebisi Shank - This Is The Second EP Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank

I’m finding it hard to handle the fact it’s been 11 years since we last heard from Adebisi Shank. The Wexford trio’s frenzied instrumental robo-punk – all cartoonish riffs, effects and vocoder, like a math rock-themed Mario Kart map – soundtracked my college years. Listening to tracks like ‘Colin Skehan’, ‘Snakehips’ and ‘Micromachines’ now, nostalgia roils up in me like an arpeggiator gone haywire, or a ramp on Rainbow Road.

Luckily, despite all the water that’s gone under the bridge since their last album – not least a long spell in the pop band All Tvvins for guitarist Lar Kaye – their second-ever EP proves there’s still a healthy dose of jet fuel left in their tank. ‘Start A Band’ sprints with the juvenile energy of a teenage jam session – a testament to the sheer joy of playing the same noodly riff again and again, or just beating the shit out of your drum kit. The glittering melody in ‘Gröss Magic’ reminds me a little of Kaye’s solo material, and erupts into one of the biggest-sounding tunes they’ve ever put out.

Guitarist Yvette Young adds an extra dash of magic to the triumphant ‘Orange Splash’, while closer ‘Turtle Bay’ sounds like a cross between Daft Punk and a cosmic prog rock smackdown. Simply put, it’s just great to have Adebisi Shank back. Long may it last. (-_-)

Ireland - Ireland [Fort Evil Fruit]

Is Ireland by Ireland the country’s defining record? Probably not. Is there a reason its cover depicts a load of lurid pink rashers and sausages hanging raw off a tree? No idea, but it’s still a thrilling suite of improvised skronk, so I’ll allow it.

Here’s a turbulent brew of bass, drums, distorted guitar and woodwind; an eight-track mess of metal, noise and free-jazz that clatters, thwacks and stumbles round itself in scrambled sequence. Don’t get it twisted, it’s not all discordance and chaos. Like all the best music of this sort, it’s got sparks of magic bursting from its din, ready to be snatched up once you let your brain embrace it. Some moments evoke post-rock’s murkier strains, like Slint or GSY! on a particularly stressful day, while others cast the sludge and scattershot percussion in a light you could almost – almost – qualify as melodic.

I’d love to hear it in a live setting, to feel the physicality and frenzy of it all in real time. For now though, listening on the top deck of a bus tumbling through traffic will do. So stand for the National Anthem, but try not to trip up.

Cruel Sister - A CORPSE IS TALKING

There’s a real buzz around Cruel Sister, and for good reason. The Dubliner’s third EP taps into that very en vogue ‘90s shoegaze, goth rock and trip-hop aesthetic, but her take on it is much more than mere nostalgia. Over five tracks, fuzzed-out guitars and reverb-heavy hooks are complimented by ear-catching production quirks and creative choices that ward off any risk of pastiche. This here’s the real deal.

The ghostly post-chorus vocal chirrups in ‘WINDOW SEAT’ tee up an explosive second half. ‘IRON PILLS’ is a glitching big beat scorcher that would’ve done absolute bits in The Matrix soundtrack, but has an evocative video of its own instead. In ‘13’, a revenge fantasy plays out over crashing drums, bass and visceral distortion, its lyrical delivery switching between chilling monotone and blood curdling screams: “Don’t touch me, I’ll gouge your eyes out someday.”

‘XOXO’ is proper Gen Z MBV but it’s the downtempo closer ‘RAW’ that leaves the most significant impression on my ears. In it, Cruel Sister’s production chops glimmer in the wavering organ synth reverberations and underwater-like beat. “I’m not going anywhere,” she sings. With the amount of promise on show in this EP, I’d certainly hope not.

Ádhamh - Casual Shifts [Front End Synthetics]

Warped electronics, west of Ireland style. Clare’s Ádhamh feels right at home on Front End Synthetics, Dublin’s longstanding outpost of experimental sonics. Using a library of sounds first created for 2024’s Earth Rising festival – Poll na bPéist: A Symphony of Scattered Electrons – and a custom-built generative toolkit, the Faoi Thalamh Records founder conjures a seven-track suite of hallucinatory synth spirals, disorienting rhythms and brain-tickling trills and glitches. It’s slippery, that’s for sure – fans Mark Fell, Autechre and Gábor Lázár will feel their synapses sizzling – but find some grip in its formless footholds and the “Hibero-futurist” effervescence at its core will reveal itself like a spell.

Plus One - Writing Wrongs | garden (2021-2023)

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It says a lot about Plus One’s production chops that, two months before sharing his first official single of the year, he casually dropped two albums worth of unreleased material on his Bandcamp as a way of clearing the decks. The 20 tracks on garden (2021 - 2023) may be fairly roughly mastered – “play out at ur own peril” – but that doesn’t matter much. Surfing the ‘nuum down luminous trails of garage, breaks and Hessle-esque techno, with detours into (post-) dubstep, d&b and ambient, he lifts the lid on the toolkit that’s made his tunes so popular with DJs like Ben UFO, Four Tet and Caribou. Testing the levels on a club sound system might be risky, but when the material is this good – particularly ‘volcaminiloguearpjam’, ‘velux’ and ‘polished’ – you might just have to take the chance.

No such precarity with Writing Wrongs. These two tracks practically beg to be played over the biggest rig you can access. ‘FRESH’ is a bouncy garage toe-tapper with a bassline that’s as buttery as it is rude; its dubwise vocal flickers and synthesised chirrups echo with the same levity as those that lit up 2024’s smash hit, ‘Bonk’. ‘ONE EYE SHUT’ alchemises that halcyon early 2010s UK club vibe – yr Hemlocks, yr Hotflushes, yr Livity Sounds, you know the stuff – with classic rave snatches and a vaporising laser beam bassline that’ll delight Verraco fans. He’s done it again!

MonoSource - 404 Future Not Found | V/A - Headstates Vol. 1 [Made Magnetic]

Made Magnetic founders Peter Lawlor (Polytunnel, Moot Tapes) and Leo Pearson started making nicely polished techno together as Solkatt back in 2017. Over time, they’ve shed much of that sheen, trading it for a dirtier, ravier, more overtly hardware-focused take on dance music across a handful of EPs. Now rebranded as MonoSource, the pair released their debut album, 404 Future Not Found, in May. There’s still a tonne of melody in these nine tracks, but there’s a machine-tooled punch and crunch to it all that makes it that bit more fit for the club. The basslines have a bit more growl, the beats a bit more bite, and the blissful synth leads burn like confetti falling on a bonfire, mingling with the embers sparking upwards.

It’s a vibe that’s echoed across Headstates Vol. 1, a new V/A on the label featuring tracks from Lawlor alongside Tr One, Tim Smith, Slow Focus, Neil Flynn and ZOiD. By turns stargazing, sun-kissed, swaggering, deep and wonky, it’s a suite of house and techno tools that’ll live happily on your USBs, ready to magnetise bodies to any dancefloor.

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