New Irish Music: June/July 2025

I’ve had a few different versions of this intro in my mind over the past two months. During the June heatwave, I thought I’d write something about ‘The Sun Is Burning’, a protest song written by Scottish folk musician Ian Campbell in 1963, popularised by Simon & Garfunkel in 1964, and done best by The Dubliners in 1972. Who else but Luke Kelly could sing words that so viscerally describe the terror of nuclear war with such gravelly pathos?

Christy Moore came pretty close in 1978, five years after singing ‘Only Our Rivers’ in the folk band Planxty’s essential self-titled album. Written by Fermanagh’s Micky MacConnell in 1965, the song laments British colonial rule in the North of Ireland, and became an anthem for the civil rights movement in the years that followed. It’s been translated into multiple languages and recorded many times over, but it was this version that hit me like a tonne of bricks last week after reading the news of yet more genocidal depravity in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s occupying forces. As always, Saoirse don Phalaistín.

I was listening to Planxty while cleaning my flat, a combo I can thoroughly recommend. You haven’t lived until you’ve scrubbed a toilet to ‘’P’ Stands For Paddy, I Suppose’, hoovered to the reels at the centre of Cold Blow and the Rainy Night, or wiped a surface down to ‘Si Bheag, Si Mhor’. The ever-reliable Rory Sweeney – whose new single ‘Entrance Places’ I wrote about last month – recommended this live rendition of ‘Băneasă's Green Glade’ to me and, holy shit, just watch Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny and Paul Brady shred on the mandolin, bouzouki and acoustic guitar. For more about Planxty and the Irish folk scene of the 1970s, I’d suggest you watch this great 2003 No Disco documentary about them, presented by Foggy Notions’ Leagues O’Toole.

Anyway, I also thought I could write about music in the films of Bob Quinn, whose works included the Atlantean documentaries, Poitín (1978), and Budawanny (1987). The idea came after listening to gw3yn's 'subterranean', a gorgeous experimental electronic track released on the Metaxu label, which you’ll read more about below. The voice in it is that of Sarah Grealish, a sean-nós singer who featured in Atlantean and was also sampled by Roger Doyle in his soundtrack for Budawanny. I quickly realised there’s a lot to dig into here, so let’s save that for another post shall we?

In the meantime, there’s an enormous round-up of new Irish music reviewed below. I’ve once again broken my own rule and written way too much, but I guess that’s the fun of this thing. I hope you find something to sink your teeth into anyway. If you do, please subscribe and help me spread the word about Anois, Os Ard. I love writing this newsletter, and have a tonne of stuff I want to do with it, if only I had the time and resources to do so. Every little nudge to get it under people’s noses is a massive help.

Okay okay! Enough chat. Let’s get into it.

Eistigí.

Metaxu - Tuam Na Farraige

On the one hand, you could take Tuam Na Farraige at face value. You could just let yourself be swept away in its alchemical current of radio samples, humming static, field recordings and snippets of spoken word, zither, fiddle, guitar, electronics, tin whistle and percussion. It’s the sort of immersive sound collage that will delight fans of claire rousay, Lia Kohl and Voice Actor; a 70-minute ambient-not-ambient tapestry that plays like a supercut of emotive ephemera with added exhaust fumes and engine rattle.

Melodies pluck heartstrings and vanish in an instant; scrambled frequencies evoke memories of dial surfing on long childhood drives; trad folk motifs are suffused with wavering synths; a climactic moment might collapse in a flurry of environmental audio, drums and distortion, but its impact will linger in the crackle and buzz that comes after. You don’t need to know who made this limited cassette, or understand the specifics of its two full-side compositions, divided into eight seamless segments apiece. You can just experience it, and find new flourishes to wonder at with each listen. For my money, it’s one of the most absorbing Irish releases of the past 12 months or more.

On the other hand, lifting the lid on this release does unearth some intriguing details. Named after a tune composed by 19th century fiddler John Mhósaí McGinley, Tuam Na Farraige is described as a “continuation/materialisation” of a live performance that took place at The Pumphouse, Dublin Port in October 2024. The event was for the closing of Liliane Puthod’s Beep Beep exhibition, which saw the French artist reanimate her late father’s 1962 Renault 4, drive it back to Ireland, and put it on display inside a shipping container. Exploring themes of memory, transience, social history, industry, consumerism and homecoming, she was joined on this road trip by musician and writer Ingrid Lyons, who, alongside the excellent Jennifer Moore, aka Dreamcycles, composed a radio-style soundtrack titled Itinerary, Itinerary… Itinéraire.

This was performed on the night, along with an improvised set by Metaxu, a shapeshifting musical project inspired by the mystic philosopher Simone Weil and led by Moore, who on this occasion was joined by Thom Dehli and Asa Nisi Masa, as well as Lyons. So is Tuam Na Farraige a live recording? Is it as simple as each set taking up one side of the tape? Is it just the latter? Or an edited melange of both? Honestly, no idea. I’m sure someone could tell me the specifics, but then again, it’s possible that the barrier to my understanding is contributing to the magic of it all. Embracing the mystery of this music has only made it more enticing. As Weil herself said, every closed door is also a way through, and every separation is a link, so I’d say just give it a spin and see where it takes you.

Junk Drawer - Days Of Heaven [Pizza Pizza Records]

I owe the members of Junk Drawer a lot. When I first started writing about music around 10 years ago, it was their bassist Brian Coney who gave me my first real shot over at The Thin Air. Throughout the next seven years or so, I absorbed a universe of indie-rock and psych bands through his and guitarist Stevie Lennox’s osmotic influence. During lockdown, I’d blast their prophetically titled debut album, Ready For The House, through headphones while cycling down deserted streets; their bong rip riffs, motorik drums and Lennox’s vocals – and those of his brother Jake – lifted me off my saddle and urged me to pedal harder and swerve wider. The lyrics in their mellower, more tuneful follow-up EP, 2022’s The Dust Has Come To Stay, wriggle their way into my mind constantly – “If I can’t be an astronaut, I’d like to be a coach driver” / “I’m always dreaming that I’ve started smoking again, just a suspended anvil man”.

Which is all to say, I was pretty excited when they announced this new album. The Belfast outfit describe Days Of Heaven as a work of ‘Cosmic Ulster Music’, a nod to the fusionist ‘Cosmic American Music’ pioneered by country rock luminary Gram Parsons in the ‘60s. Across its 10 tracks, they dip their indie-psych chassis in a post-punk-art-garage acid bath, channeling everyone from 13th Floor Elevators, Broadcast and Grateful Dead to Television, Ty Segall, Parquet Courts, Wire and Ought. Really though, they sound more assuredly like Junk Drawer than they ever have, and are clearly having a great time realising what that means.

You’ll hear it in the kaleidoscope of riffs, licks and hooks in the album’s first half. Interlocking harmonies, tight grooves and jangly passages abound in ‘Pel Mel’, ‘Nids Netica’, ‘Prisoner’ and ‘Jamie’, and there’s even some whistling in ‘Brown Sunshine’. The feeling sticks in the second half, even as drummer Rory Dee takes the tempo down and they drift into murkier territory, letting it all ooze out with queasy keys and slow-mo guitars. ‘Where Goes The Time’ is a lovely omnichord lullaby, while ‘Ghosts Of Leisure’ ends it all on an improvised live jam – a locked-in chugging rhythm chased down the country backroads toward some liminal dreamscape.

Like the music’s interplay of light and shadow, Days Of Heaven’s lyrics pull off a similar trick, untangling ideas of identity, male friendship, forgotten pasts and the “lost promised futures that Ulster could have had” with allusions to boarded up shopfronts (‘Nids Netica’), placenames consumed by cultural memory (‘Loughgall Circus’), and euphoric moments in snooker history (‘Black Ball ‘85’). Lines like “Have you ever seen your uncle’s hundred yard stare?” and “The cost price of Ulster is the silence of our men” pair with those like “I’m going down the chip shop and I’m taking you all with me” and “Friend’s got a new job title: Head Of Atrocities” and linger in the mind, but none of it’s meant as a grand address or anything like that. It’s just four guys picking at the strands of their reality in the same way you would after a long night in the pub, all exposed sinew and dry humour – figuring it out, whatever “it” is, under the peculiar hue of their own placeholding sign, instruments in hand, tilting out toward the cosmos.

Amanda Feery - NEST [Krim Kram]

"NEST is an expression of how I feel about home as a refuge, of which everyone is deserving,” says composer Amanda Feery about this operatic drone opus. “But it's also an expression of my deep sadness about the seizure of home, occupation of land, and the violence of colonisation.”

A companion piece to one written for the multi-disciplinary artist and activist Eimear Walshe’s Romantic Ireland exhibition in 2024, the music here – a 43-minute amalgam of organ, electronics, uilleann pipe samples, tin whistle and field recordings – centres on segments of a libretto performed by the male close-harmony quartet 4 in a Bar. Written by Walshe, the words depict an elderly man on his deathbed on the night of Éamon de Valera's 1943 address, On Language and the Irish Nation, which broadcasts through his radio as a mob comes to evict him and tear his house down: “They come to make a ruin.”

It’s a devastating text, made all the more brutal by the beauty of its delivery, sung unaccompanied toward the end of the piece like a funeral hymn: “The house has sown its seed in me / And soon when I am dust / Another hand will come / And make me into blocks / And build their home of me.” I’m reminded a little of David Lang’s ‘Just (After Song of Songs)’, but the music throughout – featuring additional guitar and electronics from Cork noise artist Declan Synnott – takes it into a world of its own.

While its images may be drawn from Irish history, NEST is crucially universal, and staggeringly pertinent. While listening, you may consider Ireland’s ever-deepening housing crisis, its record levels of homelessness, and callous treatment of asylum seekers forced to flee their homes. You may think of the millions forcibly uprooted by war in Sudan and The Democratic Republic of Congo. You may feel a flare up despair and indignation at Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where two million people are continuously subjected to the most depraved acts of displacement, mass murder and starvation. All of these feelings surge through Walshe’s words and the sustained tones of this music, not offering catharsis, but rather fuel and focus. “The album is for the people of Palestine, then, now, and forever,” wrote Feery upon on announcing its release. A gesture of solidarity, and an ode to the sanctity of home, of which everyone is deserving.

V/A - The Sky Was a Mouth Again [Diet Of Worms]

In 1964, the state of Indiana banned The Kingsmen’s 'Louie Louie’ following complaints of obscenity in its lyrics. The Portland, Oregon band’s clattering garage rock cover of Richard Berry's 1955 doo-wop standard is more or less incomprehensible, but that didn’t stop the FBI launching a 31 month investigation into it, trying to uncover the dirt in its verses. They failed, and the campaign of censorship only served to increase the song’s countrywide popularity, setting it up to become one of the most covered songs in modern music – a rebellious belter whose words its detractors couldn’t understand. Funny that. The more things change…

Anyway, last year the Irish label Diet Of Worms released Hunger Is Violence, a 14-track compilation that saw artists including Natalia Beylis, Seamas Hyland, pôt-pot and Coolgirl deliver experimental renditions of the song, all to raise funds for the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). Now, it’s expanded on that same brief with The Sky Was a Mouth Again, casting a wider net to assemble a star-studded cast of international artists alongside those from Ireland.

You’d be forgiven for thinking 18 versions of the same song could get tedious, but there’s serious range on display here, and some genuine gold inside. Most interpretations bear little or no resemblances to the original: New York’s Lea Bertucci opens things up with a work of shoreside drone, all ominous foghorn and field recordings; Nonpareils samples the voice of Palestinian man pleading for the end to the genocide in Gaza over glitching noise; Conrad Standish and Valentina Magaletti serve minimalist percussion and throbbing sub-bass; Rich(ard) Dawson’s instrumental ‘Orbuculum’ is part clattery kosmische, part Japanese ambient, and part squelchy electronica, but mostly it’s just lovely. You get the idea.

Others steer closer to the source material: Junior Brother untangles the lyrics and stitches them into a yowling folk lament; ELLLL’s ‘Chewie Chewie’ weaves a sample of René Touzet And His Orchestra’s ‘El Loco Cha Cha’ – the song Richard Berry first interpolated for 'Louie Louie’– into thick slice of technoid dub. I could go on. More importantly, all proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), so please dig into your pockets and give generously.

Physique - Bright Lights, L'il City [Miúin]

On the face of it, French Lick, Indiana is a fairly unremarkable town. Or is it? Founded in 1857, the former trading post became a spa resort in the early 20th century thanks to its rich mineral springs. Its casinos attracted celebrities like boxer Joe Louis, composer Irving Berlin and gangster Al Capone. Chicago sports teams practiced there during WW2. It’s the birthplace of legendary basketball player Larry Bird. America’s best-selling laxative, Pluto Water, was bottled there. So was 7 Up.

It’s also the name of a track on Bright Lights, L'il City, the second album from Kilkenny musician Neil Quigley and Chicagoan Sam Scranton. It’s a nice, lolloping new age ambient jingle, all clanky keys, synthesised chirrups and woozy guitars, like Pauline Anna Strom pivoting from the cosmos to some local diner’s jukebox, or a chorus of alien birds resting on a dodgy power line. As Physique, Quigley and Scranton specialise in this sort of thing – a wonky take on easy listening in the mould of Mort Garson and M. Sage, but with nature’s inspiration traded for something altogether more municipal and mundane, wondrous in its own way.

Produced over the course of three years, and influenced by everything from Yellow Magic Orchestra and Martin Denny’s Exotica to L.A Noire and Ridley Scott’s video for Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’, these eight tracks are the result of an easy-going collaboration between two friends, passing musical ideas back and forth as you might a meme or a YouTube link. There’s an irreverence to it that fans of Quigley’s Miún label will be familiar with, but it’s less surreal here. Instead, it’s an earnest ode to everyday magic, delivered in a playfully experimental lilt.

You’ll hear it in ‘Wunder-Baum’ and ‘Mayor Daley Clock’, where sounds of all sorts rustle, chime and wriggle in weird synchronicity, and licks of guitar drift and glitch like flickering street lamps at night. ‘Soft Options’ sounds like stepping into a psychedelic motel lobby, while ‘Desperate Housewives S04E05’ – an episode titled Art Ain’t Easy btw – is a flurry of squelchy keys and throbbing kick drums. The distorted voices in the title track crumble and crunch over twilit ambient drones, advertising life in “the nation’s heartland”. It’s tongue-in-cheek, sure, but remove the post-war capitalist tone and you’ll pick up on a vibe that’s reflected across the album – that even the littlest towns and sounds have a lot to offer.

Milkweed - Remscéla

Lo-fi beats to… cattle raid to? As far as source texts go, the Táin Bó Cúailnge is a rich one, but I wasn’t expecting to hear a record with lyrics derived entirely from its pages. That’s what we get with Remscéla, the new album from “slacker trad” duo Milkweed, who weave the foretales of this Irish mythological epic into ten experimental folk songs with a dusty hip-hop spine.

The elusive UK-based pair have priors in this department: their previous releases have dug into Folklore Society journals and ancient tales from Wales and Denmark for inspiration. Here, they extract the words of Thomas Kinsella’s definitive 1969 translation, specifically those of its pre-tales, which set-up the story of Queen Medb of Connacht’s plot to steal a prize bull from Ulster, and the ensuing war between her army and the hero Cú Chulainn. Milkweed’s vocalist, known only as G, delivers these verses in an almost incantatory metre, muffled with distortion and mingled with throbbing drum beats, bass, guitar and banjo. Everything sounds like it’s disintegrating: segments are crudely spliced, wavering on their tape spools before glitching into gear again.

‘The Pangs Of Ulster’, the album’s longest track at just over four minutes, tells of a curse cast on all of the men of the province, who are made to feel the pain of a woman in labour, making them incapable of fighting. G sings over warbling static drones and a stumbling beat, before grainy samples of a fiddle at a trad session fade into the mix. It’s a standout moment in an album that’s full of them, from the tender folk of ‘The Milk-Fed Calf’ to the scuzzy psych of 'Imbas Forasnai, the Light of Foresight’.

In an interview with Still Listening, Milkweed cited Kinsella’s intention of creating a “living version” of The Táin, and of leaving “as few obstacles as possible between the original and the reader”. In continuing that pursuit, they’ve opened a strange musical portal into the work, and into Irish mythology as a whole.

Coolgirl - interim

If Coolgirl’s 2024 debut, Road Closures, conjured images of late night drives down eerie country lanes, then its follow-up evokes the mysterious barn party you find at the end. Gone are the shadowy ambient electronics and foreboding sub-bass drones of its predecessor; the five tracks on Interim tap into sleazy retro synth and darkwave. Pull back the rusty old door and step inside its slow-mo disco dreamscape, where VHS tapes play on vintage TVs and mustachioed dancers sway under acid neon lights.

When Lizzie Fitzpatrick – formerly of grunge band Bitch Falcon – became Coolgirl, she wanted to channel the musical stylings of Miami Vice composer Jan Hammer and create a soundtrack to an imaginary gay cop porn movie. While that project was ultimately shelved – you can still hear some demos here – the opening track of Interim, ‘Porno’, feels like a police-free alternative. Its video depicts the PG bits of some saucy ‘70s flicks accompanied by a wavering synth lead and slinky bassline.

‘Tell Me The Truth’ is a post-'Inspector Norse’ disco stomper complete with a little bit of Gaeilge – “i ndáiríre!?” – while ‘I Want To Watch You’ is a slice of horny cyborg EBM. ‘Ice Cream’ sounds like stepping outside into the morning sun, dazed and caked in sweat, the vaporwave glow melting behind you, giving way to clear-eyed keys and a rush of blissful synth.

Ddrome - Spider Temple [Front End Synthetics]

In the free improv trio ZEROPUNKT, drummer Jamie Davis provides the glue. On albums like ZPEP and Clap Your Hands Say No, his scattershot beats help fasten Fergus Cullen’s synthesiser, saxophone, clarinet and guitar jams to Damien Lennon’s heady bass drifts. It’s a rhythm-based tether that secures the Dublin band’s spontaneous psychedelia to the ground, keeping things cosmic without ever stretching too far into the trippy ether.

On his debut solo effort for Front End Synthetics, that knot comes undone, the gravitational pull switched off. You might find yourself floating further toward deep space in the 20-minute title track, carried on abyssal drones and pulsing bass, gently propelled by Davis’ cymbal swells, bells and shakers toward a dubbed-out jazz noir zone a lá Tortoise. Amidst the oozing keys and loose-limbed percussive passages, a sound like a classroom chant ends things on an uncanny Boards Of Canada-style warble.

That headspace lingers in ‘On the Way to Almost Crossing the Bridge of Understanding’ in which a fleeting vocal sample – “you are wonderful, you are beautiful, and I love you all” – sends us off into a haze of synthesised sound design and mysterious film score samples. The Last Sound rounds it out with a remix of ‘Spider Temple’, which sends us deeper into an interstellar cloud of distorted drones and a mechanical beat chugging faintly in the distance.

Francesca O - Cortado [Nyahh Records]

Francesca Ogbuachi is primarily a photographer and filmmaker. The Limerick-based Italian-Nigerian artist’s analogue visual output comprises fleeting vignettes of everyday life; she produces beautiful yet often barely perceptible narratives with her Super 8 lens, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks for themselves as they take in the abstract interplay of light, shadow and shape.

It’s a vibe that’s reflected in her musical debut for Nyahh Records. Over 10 tracks, muffled field recordings and lo-fi crackles underscore simple piano melodies and motifs. It’s music that mingles easily with what’s going on around it. Listening while pottering around at home on a hot summer’s day, I was charmed by the way these compositions, which could have just as easily been coming in through the window from my keyboard-playing neighbour’s flat, interacted with the sounds outside – some children playing, a passing chat, a cyclist’s bell, a distant siren, a barking dog. It illuminated this mundane afternoon, with all its quotidian simplicity, in a light that made it feel so much more significant. It’ll have you finding stories in every little thing you hear. Big big tip for fans of Duval Timothy and Natalia Beylis’ Love-In-A-Mist, Edible.

V/A - Place: Ireland [Air Texture]

New York label Air Texture’s place compilations have illuminated music scenes all over the world, from Nairobi and Toronto to Egypt, Ecuador, Morocco and Georgia. Now, with the help of Efa O’Neill, it’s turned its lens to Ireland, zooming in on its electronic undergrowth across 21 tracks spanning elasticated club stuff, effervescent downtempo, and all sorts of tributaries in between. The Kerry-born, Dublin-based DJ digs deep, inviting emerging and established artists from every corner of the country to contribute, many of whom I’d not crossed paths with before. “I was conscious of representing all parts of Ireland,” she told me recently. “Rural areas, cities, north, south – to give a genuine sense of what’s coming out of the country.”

Raising funds for Birdwatch Ireland’s marine conservation efforts, it makes sense that the compilation begins with Soria’s ‘Albatross’, in which hushed incantations and hymnal vocals pour like sea foam in slow motion over mystical synth drones. West Cork’s Flowers At Night sends this vibe skyward like a crashing wave with celestial keys and a crisp beat.

There are dancefloor mood builders courtesy of The Outside and Sad City, while Olive Hatake’s ‘Boys Do Cry’ is an emotive early morning amapiano jam. From garage and bass mutations to house, electro and techno scorchers, there’s honestly something to cater to all tastes here. Regular AOA readers will know to expect something particularly great from the tracks by Lighght, Lúnasa, TR One and polyp.

There’ll be an interview and mix from O’Neill coming up in the newsletter in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, dive in here. You won’t be disappointed.

Phil Langero - Practical Dancing (for the Modern Man) [Rocket Recordings]

When doomscrolling is a default setting and online discourse bears only brainrot and crippling anxiety, the desire to ditch it all and head for some rural cabin can become almost unbearable. It was in one such setting – a small studio tucked away in the woodland of Coolyduff, Co. Cork – that Phil Langero produced Practical Dancing (for the Modern Man), an album described as an “antidote to our post-covid digital division times”.

For the Hawk Bastard, Damp Howl and Moundabout musician, the remedy for this modern malady is dance, but not the nicely choreographed kind. With his soundtrack of murky, industrial dub noise and bluesy bog kosmische, Langero taps into something much more primal – a flailing, lurching exorcism he reckons could purge us of our toxicity and disdain and bring us all together again. At least a little bit.

A fanciful idea, sure, but these eight tracks do sound fairly fucking gnarly regardless. ‘Back Agin The Wall’ sounds like King Tubby wrestling Mark Lanegan in some waterlogged marsh, while queasy whispers, bass and guitar noodles ooze around a skeletal beat in ‘The Shots’. ‘Single Ladies’ is not a Beyoncé cover, but it is a seven-minute frenzy of syncopated snares and scorching guitar shreds. Cathartic? Quite possibly. Feral? Certainly.

‘Demons In My Network’ is all skronk and snarl, the sound of Twitter trolls inhaling the smoke of a ritual modem burning before the funeral march of ‘Complicit’ leads us to the end. By the time ‘Horse Before The Cart’ groans into view with its rumbling distortion and wordless vocalisations, you may have slow-mo lunged around your living room enough that you missed your phone going off. Maybe not. But if you let yourself sink into the weird tonic this album offers you, and allow yourself to sway away to its strange rhythm, it just might take you out of the digital malaise for a while. So then, what are you waiting for?

KAJA - Paths

On 8th June, the city of Malmö, Sweden celebrated World Ocean Day with a series of events at its Southern Wharf Basin, including a sound installation with work from local Dubliner J. Cowhie, whose piece weaves ambient drones through field recordings made above and below the sea’s surface. ‘Ocean Reflection’ – which will be in place until September and also includes a composition by Lucy Cathcart Fröden – forms part of his research into noise pollution and its effects on marine life, and intends to use sound as a way of raising awareness of it as a global issue.

It’s an immersive project whose soundscape is reflected in Paths, Cowhie’s latest album under his KAJA alias, which wades through frosty synth passages and foggy expanses with a steady rhythmic pulse over nine tracks. ‘Scriptr’ pumps like a heartbeat heard through an ultrasound, something Cowhie previously sampled in 2017’s Womb Echo. Multiple cuts carve deep house and bass-laden techno beats out of glacial ice, their minimal drums subsumed in billowing low-end. Dubby downtempo tracks like ‘Dikul’ and ‘F18e06’ ascend from the bubbling depths of an icy pool, reaching out toward patches of melodic light flickering on the surface.

Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies - TECHNOHIPPIES! ACTIVATE!

If there’s another EP out there that starts with a slow air and ends on ‘70s krautrock psychedelia, with brash rap beef and trad punk scuzz sandwiched in between, then I’m yet to hear it. That’s exactly what we’ve got here, courtesy of Limerick’s Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies, who are back with their first new music since last year’s “ruralcore” dance rock LP, KEEP ON RAVING IN THE FIRST WORLD.

TECHNOHIPPIES! ACTIVATE! begins with a beautiful redux of ‘Plassey Air’, an original fiddle tune that’s lived on Podge’s Soundcloud for 10 years, and which conjures wistful images of riverside strolls along the Shannon at sunset. Its disarming gentleness makes the gut-punch impact of ‘JOHNNY TURPENTINE’ all the more startling, its chanted chorus and Balkanised violin bridge propelled by battered drums and distortion. ‘REHEATED BEEF’ taps into gnarly ‘90s big beat while Podge spits venom at some unnamed nemesis, while ‘ONE FOR KIM’ takes a trip the N21 out of the city and out toward Ash Ra Templeglantine for a crunchy kosmische funk finishing move.

That’s all for this month. Until next time!