New Irish Music: November 2025

The thing about taking a month off from this newsletter is that there’s always a huge amount of Irish music I want to write about by the time the next edition rolls around. With that in mind, I’ll spare you too much preamble here and let the heap of releases reviewed below do the legwork. All told, despite the short break from AOA business, things have remained fairly hectic in these parts, so I haven’t really had a chance to come up with anything more interesting to say anyway.

Even with all this end-of-year busyness, I did manage to get back home to Cahir for a week in November to see my folks. On an early-morning run up the hills not far from town, I saw some deer and caught the sunrise over the valley below. I took out my earbuds and let the silence do its thing, blemished only by my own panting breath and the sound of distant traffic on the motorway. Corny as it may seem, it’s not lost on me that a view I’ve seen a thousand times can still inspire some level of awe and calm amidst the turbulence. (Vom. Sorry.)

It’s a serenity I felt again some days later, the rural quiet swapped for a tsunami of sound at the My Bloody Valentine show in Dublin. No one needs another live review, but believe me when I say that experiencing that magenta-hued wall of sound IRL exceeded any expectation I might have had in the lead up. While levitating on that cloud of pure noise, I briefly thought to myself how nice it is that Kevin Shields gets to go home to his own bed afterwards, presumably unfazed by the genuine wonder he and the rest of the band just blasted into 13,000 sets of ears.

Upon returning to London, I went to see Junior Brother in Brixton. I hadn’t seen the Kerryman play since a tiny solo gig in February 2020, and was struck by just how much of an evolution he’s gone through as a performer since then. Songs from his new album The End – which I reviewed here – sounded incredible, particularly the jaw-dropping closer ‘New Road’ and the booming ‘Old Bell’. It reaffirmed in my mind that he’s surely one of the best songwriters to come out of Ireland in the past 10 years. Consider this a follow-up recommendation for the new record, and to see him live if you get the chance.

Right then, onto this month’s round-up. We’ve got multi-genre electronics and open-hearted psych rock; Connemara goth rock and uncanny slowcore; sophisti-pop and alt-folk; bittersweet sampledelia and weird ritual kosmische; many shades of ambient music and lots of sound system-twisting club material. A little something for everyone.

I’ll be back soon with more stuff, and in the meantime I hope your year starts winding down nicely. You’ve earned it. Dive into the reviews below.

Eistigí.

Rory Sweeney - Old Earth

There’s seemingly no corner of Irish underground music that Rory Sweeney hasn’t had some role in over the past few years. Whether he’s slinging out electronic experiments of all shades on Bandcamp, assembling an all-star cast of MCs for the Irish Hash Mafia mixtape, linking up with avant-pop and sci-fi dance artists like Pippa Moloney and Sloucho, or blowing out speakers with the frenzied noise and breakcore collective Bitten Twice, he’s repeatedly proven himself to be a vital cog in the country’s new sonic ecosystem.

On Old Earth, his second album, these varied credentials and omnivorous tastes converge. Across 10 tracks encompassing everything from post-club refractions and weightless grime to hymnal ambience, hip-hop and Celtic jungle futurism, his multi-genre talents are alchemised into something genuinely wonderful. But perhaps more importantly, it’s a portrait of a diverse creative community coming together under one canopy, illuminating the collaborative spirit that keeps this scene alive and thriving.

It opens with ‘Entrance Places’, an enchanting single made up of shoreside field recordings, melodious bells, keys from keening revivalist RÓIS, reverb-soaked vocals from Saoirse Miller, and a gorgeous piano outro from Risteárd Ó hAodha. From there, Sweeney and company explore themes of accelerationism, hauntology and Stone Tape Theory, interrogating the contradictory realities of Ireland as a place steeped in mysticism and otherworldly lore, and as a hub of relentless Big Tech capitalism. ‘Ether_live2024’ finds Belfast MC EMBY toasting over a smoke-filled dubstep cavern, before multiple artists recite their dreams over wavering synth swells. Elsewhere, Emily Beattie layers lullaby harmonies over the velvet bass drones and crackling downtempo drums of ‘In The Deep’.

Lush centrepiece ‘Morning Song (ft. Risteárd Ó hAodha)’ maps the terrain between Steve Reich and Oneohtrix Point Never, before ‘Mideval Times’ sees Curtisy and Ahmed, With Love trading verses over a beat that pits hypnagogic hip-hop against a clavinet-led melody and coda evoking The Bothy Band and Andy Irvine’s virtuosic folk. In ‘Ruh Roh’, Ushmush raps as Gaeilge over a snarling jungle beat co-produced with Roo Honeychild, before Bitten Twice co-founder Julia Louise Knifefist ends it all with an eruption of breaks and feral barks in ‘Don’t Talk’. It’s a finishing move that’ll leave you thrilled and breathless, ready to leap back to the start for another spin, when you’ll inevitably find something new to sink your teeth into. I don’t say this lightly: Old Earth is a triumph.

The Altered Hours - The Altered Hours [Pizza Pizza Records]

In a recent interview with the podcast, The Altered Hours’ guitarist and singer Cathal MacGabhann described the Cork band’s self-titled third album as heralding a second chapter in their 15-year story so far. It’s easy to see what he means. These 10 songs find the five-piece on surer footing than ever before, still wielding the psych rock, shoegaze and post-punk influences of their previous output, but arriving at what truly feels like their own open-hearted sweet spot as MacGabhann and Elaine Howley’s duetting vocals take centre stage over arrangements dipped in acid blues and smoked-out indie-pop romanticism.

A lot of this progression comes down to sheer experience. The band – completed by Patrick Cullen on bass, Nora Lewon on drums, and Jack Horgan on guitar – have been around the block a fair few times now, rightly earning their status as one of the country’s most respected underground outfits. In 2023, MacGabhann took a side quest as Fontaines D.C’s live guitarist for a tour around Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Meanwhile, Howley’s become a lo-fi dream pop star in her own right thanks to sublime solo releases on Touch Sensitive and Modern Love.

You can sense all of this in The Altered Hours, an album tracked live and recorded entirely to tape at Julie McLarnon’s Analogue Catalogue studio in Newry. There’s a reinvigorated confidence in the back-and-forth vocal hooks and blazing instrumentation of opener ‘Turn Away’, which stretches well into MacGabhann’s full-throated pleas and the reverb-soaked blues rock guitars in ‘Such A Steal’, and the yearning harmonies of single ‘Lay There With You’.

Howley’s vocals in the magnificent ‘Paper Roses’ provide the album’s most beautiful moment, accompanied by a jangly 12-string melody and woozy guitar slides. Elsewhere, ‘TNT’ taps into the band’s knack for a full-pelt anthem, all driving drums and fuzzed-out guitar shreds, while ‘Heavy Red Blossoms’ is a reminder of their timeless psychedelic flair.

In 2014, The Altered Hours released ‘Dig Early’, a scorching single that, to my mind, remains one of the best Irish tracks of the 21st century so far. While there have been plenty of high points in their journey since then, this album feels like a new peak. It’s the sound of a band with a revitalised belief in who they are – charged up and ready for the next chapter.

Olan Monk - Songs For Nothing [AD 93]

“I’ve been driving around Connemara in a SEAT Ibiza and I’m going nowhere fast,” sings Olan Monk in ‘10 Days’, a track from their second album, Songs For Nothing. You’d be forgiven for finding this lyric a little unusual in a record of gothic art rock, its black and white cover depicting the Inverin native on the shore of a grayscale Atlantic. The truth is that it embodies much of what these 10 tracks explore. Written upon returning after years spent living abroad, here we find Monk untangling internal knots and contradictions on the nature of home, absence, and the act of going back to go forward.

Throughout the LP, Monk’s first since 2020’s remarkable Love / Dead and 2021’s Auto Life EP, these feelings manifest not just in their lyrics, but in the music itself. Informed by the coastal landscape and culture they grew up in, their mix of nocturnal noise pop, digital grunge and traditional Irish folk is at once rugged and teeming with life. You’ll hear it in the deep rumble of Aindriú De Buitléir’s bodhrán in opening track ‘Corp’, which billows around Monk’s Angelus-like piano gongs and Peadar Tom Mercier of Trá Pháidín’s violin, creaking and groaning like a rusty weathervane in a storm.

The gale force picks up in ‘Drón Feadóige’ as Monk pairs howling guitar gusts with hawk-like reverberations of tin whistle, an instrument they played in school as a child, and which they pepper through this album’s tracklist. After a slew of high-profile collaborations with the likes of Moin and Ghost Mountain, they assemble a trad session’s worth of co-conspirators here including Dylan Kerr and Róisín Berkeley, who weave flute and harp passages through the scuzzy foundations of ‘10 Days’. Risteárd Ó hAodha’s cello morphs into the fuzzed-out grooves of ‘Pomegranates’ and the Black Metal-esque ‘Blank Page’, accompanying Monk’s monotone croon: “Waste away, can’t remain, getting lost on the blank page.”

Maria Somerville, a close friend and collaborator who released her own Connemara-inspired album this year in Luster, sings on the sort of Deftones-y ‘Down 3’ and ‘Fate (Reprise)’, a reimagining of a track from Love / Dead. ‘Can’t Wait’ threads field recordings from a walk along the Cois Fharraige coastline into its arrangement of string loops, mechanised beats and crushed guitars. The album ends on ‘Amhrán Mhaínse’, an instrumental rendition of a sean-nós song about wanting to be buried in your homeland amongst your people. Reconfigured here with slow-mo accordion sighs and overdriven guitar quakes, it’s a fitting end to an album that pays tribute to its native environment in its own way – reverential but never mawkish; loving but not blindly idealised. Like the Connemara landscape itself, Songs For Nothing is a weather-beaten beauty that’s as enchanting as it is unforgiving. Like standing on the edge of a vast and wild expanse, it’s an ode to the process of relinquishing, and what we find within when we let go of everything else.

Hilary Woods - Night CRIÚ [Sacred Bones Records]

Hilary Woods rediscovers her voice on Night CRIÚ, rerouting the shadowy atmospherics of her recent instrumental records into the nocturnal slowcore songwriting of her pre-2020 output. Across seven succinct songs steeped in reverberant textures and cassette-like crackle, the musician and analogue filmmaker undergoes a quietly cathartic process, moving through grief into light, and exploring what she recently referred to in The Wire as a “conversation between our singular body and the collective body”.

Influenced by the degraded yet deeply tactile work of early Czech and Italian filmmakers, these songs gesture to the past, but radiate something otherworldly into the present. With mixing duties and additional production from David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley, and cello from Oliver Turvey, as well as appearances from a brass band and a children’s choir, the whole thing would sound great played through an old gramophone, but there’s an uncanny ambience to it all that lifts Woods’ vocals into a different plane, where the physical and ethereal meet. It’s an album of hushed magic, in which the human voice casts a spell of self-reclamation, and invites you to join in its chorus.

Iona Zajac - Bang [Post Electric]

The contributions of Edinburgh-born, formerly Dublin-based singer-songwriter Iona Zajac to Ireland’s musical landscape are more than enough to earn her an honorary spot in this month’s round-up. She’s played alongside the likes of Lankum, Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn; she sang on Ian Nyquist’s recent album of bodhrán experiments; she’s the new live vocalist for The Pogues for god’s sake!

On her superb debut album, she tunnels into themes of womanhood and resilience, unafraid to get dirt under her nails as she unearths stark vignettes on trauma, violence and abuse from the soil, but finding equal measures of catharsis, pleasure and beauty buried in its depths. Inspired by Maya Angelou and Emily Dickinson, Zajac tears at the knots of tough lyrical subject matter with a razor sharp mix of acerbic humour, heft and elegance, her full-bodied vocals set to a backdrop of alternative folk that will chime with fans of ØXN and Emma Ruth Rundle as much as Angel Olsen and Julia Jacklin.

famous tex - dublinkissangel [MirrorWorld]

A quick rummage through famous tex’s Soundcloud unearths a beguiling mix of post-internet ambience, vaporous trap, and dreamy club experiments, but it won’t quite prepare you for the full experience of dublinkissangel. Released via MirrrorWorld – home to Henry Earnest’s sparkly bedroom pop – and mastered by Finn Carraher McDonald, aka Nashpaints, here’s a suite of blown out electronic bliss that hits like an exploding SAD lamp. Some tracks from the archive are here, like the shimmering cloud rap instrumental ‘sinusa’ and the sampledelic hip-hop glitchfest ‘rosewater capo’, but most of it’s brand new. From beatless euphoria a lá Barker through distorted headrushes of digital ethereality and maximalist ambient pop, it’s music that whirrs and glitches toward infinity. Like a blast of sea air to the face, it’s a shot of pure serotonin. It mightn’t beat the winter blues alone, but it sure as hell won’t hurt.

bog band - Mocashno Days

Preluded with a run of singles that felt like Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile tunes for the bedroom pop generation, bog band’s debut album is as sweet as you’d expect. Stephen Sorensen and Isaac Clarke wear their sophisti-pop influences on their sleeve, but stitch their open-hearted songs with a contemporary thread. Filigreed electronic flourishes and playful production quirks are peppered through their starry-eyed arrangements of guitar, keys and drum machines, carrying honeyed vocals that map a route from Sade to Bullion and back again. Its eight songs pass in just 25 minutes, and are oh so easy to adore. Big tip if you need your soul warmed up a little bit.

Seán Mac Erlaine & Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh - Old Segotia

Experimental multi-instrumentalist Seán Mac Erlaine and 10-string fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh join forces for a suite of gorgeous electroacoustic jazz-meets-trad that’s working wonders on my frayed nerves. Named after that sweet Dublin vernacular for a dear friend, there’s a gentleness to the way these two musicians’ worlds converse across 11 tunes. Strings, woodwind, percussion and electronics chatter and drift like a Sunday morning meander through a quiet town, following curious threads of melody, texture and emotional tenor wherever they lead, unhurried and unphased. By the time ornithologist Seán Ronayne’s birdsong recordings fade into the mix in closer ‘Oíche Crua as a Sléibhte’, you might feel yourself breathing just a little bit easier.

JaBro - Wish U Luv(ed) [The Unscene]

Limerick’s underground axis The Unscene bows out with a typically off-kilter collection of bittersweet hip-hop sampledelia from JaBro. Informed by feelings of loss and heartache, the young (and quite possibly only) beatmaker from the town of Hospital chops and splices melodic strands of harp, woodwind, guitar, synth and janky piano with lovelorn vocal snatches and dusty drums. In this abstract collage of glitching instrumentals and woozy atmospherics, you’ll find an emotional core holding the whole thing together. RIYL MIKE, The Avalanches, or your Dilla tapes after a while in the microwave.

Nurse With Wound / Diarmuid MacDiarmada - LUNG OYSTERS [Arcana Hibernia]

Cult experimental outfit Nurse With Wound returns in full band form, linking up with Rún’s Diarmuid MacDiarmada and Tara Baoth Mooney for eight cuts of hallucinatory psych rock and weird ritual kosmische. Stretching jams around trance-inducing rhythms – some motorik, some shamanic, some more fractured and freeform – it’s a tumble down a spiral staircase into krautrock’s murky basement, where Can, Ash Ra and Faust records are warped beyond repair, and the strange melodic spores go straight to your head.

Gareth Quinn Redmond - Múscailte [sound as language]

Having already released one of the most enchanting Irish albums of the year as part of the harp-led band Throwing Shapes – read my review here – ambient synthesist and violin player Gareth Quinn Redmond returns with a new suite inspired by Japanese environmental music, or Kankyō Ongaku. Like 2023’s Ar Ais Arís, or his spellbinding collaboration with Albert Karch for the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny in 2024, the six tracks of Múscailte levitate like flecks of fine dust in the morning light. Listening to the delicate melodies of his Hohner Pianet keyboard as they slowly drift by, the feeling is like waking up with nothing to do and nothing to worry about, a soft pillow on one side of your face, and a warm sunbeam gently caressing the other. Catnip for fans of Emily A. Sprague, Satoshi Ashikawa and Hiroshi Yoshimura.

Small Crab - Sonder [First Second Label]

As it celebrates a decade of off-kilter club releases, First Second Label taps German-born, Dublin-based Small Crab for four cuts of hyperkinetic percussion and warped bass that’ll delight fans of Doctor Jeep, Verraco and the TraTraTrax extended universe. Weaving dubstep, baile funk, d&b and techno into its sub-soaked fabric, with a skittering peak-time remix from Glimmerman to boot, it’s a knockout.

Minced Oath - Sonar Kella

Modular synth wizard Dunk Murphy wraps up a year that’s seen him release “algo-machine funk” as Supervalu and zapped electro curveballs alongside Front End Synthetics founder Paul Morrin as Confirmation Getup with an album of luminous ambient music under his Minced Oath moniker. Where the project’s previous releases tapped into the atmospheric noise of old vampire films and the vibe of a haunted gong bath, this new one oozes crepuscular lovelines. Don’t get it twisted, it’s still weird – I’ve mentioned this before, but you’d expect no less from someone once described by Autechre’s Rob Brown as one of the best musicians on the planet – but there’s a radiance to these tracks that gives every amorphous clonk and glitch a certain shimmer. Like walking down the side of a mountain as the sun begins to set, your step may feel unsteady, but the view is spectacular.

The Last Sound - All That’s Missed [Cruel Nature Records]

If you like your apocalypse with a side of psychedelic dream pop then look no further than this latest dispatch from Whirling Hall Of Knives’ Barry Murphy, aka The Last Sound. Chasing his excellent 2024 anthology, Veered, the 10 tracks on All That’s Missed confront modern life’s myriad anxieties – the scourge of division, merciless uncertainty, rampant corruption, corporate vampirism, you know the stuff – and seek out reasons to be dazzled and grateful in spite of it all. Redlining drum machines, effect-burnt vocals and scorched synthesisers emit technicolour sparks and neon-tinted smoke as they blaze through passages of ecstatic kosmische and post-noise hypnagogia, searching for bliss amidst the dread.

Kerrie - Echoes Of The Live Wire [Tresor Records]

Tresor resident Kerrie returns with an EP befitting the Berlin techno institution. Tapping into the raw, spontaneous energy of her live sets, the Manchester-based, Cork-born artist serves up seven cuts of tough-as-fuck fuel for dark dancefloors in the heads-down hours.

Deathbed Convert - Music For Wave States [Touch Sensitive]

Connor Dougan weaves healing frequencies through shoreline surf and birdsong on his latest album for Belfast’s Touch Sensitive label. Where 2024’s Inverse Field Vol. 1 – Inishowen found the electronic musician improvising with the environmental audio of Donegal’s north coast to create an ambient portrait of a place, this new one delves into just why that combination of blissful synth drones and field recordings works so well. Born out of experiments in binaural beats, pink noise and solfeggio frequencies used in sound therapy, slowly pulsing bass tones and silky melodies provide a bed for chirping birds, foaming waves and twinkling bells to levitate over for a truly soothing 67 minutes. It’s capital A ambient music of the classic Brian Eno slash Stars Of The Lid school, but fear not, this is no throwaway pastiche. Dougan holds his materials with care, his pure intentions clear in every gentle note and chime.

subglow/Live 6: EMA @ pe:rsona ‘25

Few have done more for Dublin’s dance music ecosystem in recent years than EMA, but it’s important to be reminded that, as well as being the programmer at Yamamori Tengu and founder of the Woozy label, she’s an outrageously sick DJ first and foremost. This mix shared via CCL’s subglow should do the trick. Recorded live at pe:rsona festival in France during the summer, here’s a whirlwind of low end frequencies and thundering percussion, spun from lysergic strands of dubstep, techno and all manner of sound system-indebted club stuff in between and beyond. With cuts from Otik, NVST, DJ JM and many more, it doubles as a spotlight on bass-oriented dance music’s new vanguard, in which EMA is an essential player.

o3o ~ polyp

This cosy set from Dublin-based polyp (fka Lychee) for Dutch series o3o is an ideal pairing for these colder mornings. A far cry from the hyperactive club material they spun in the mix I wrote about last year, here we find easy-going ambient, new age and experimental electronics from the likes of Hi-Posi, James Ferraro and Cotton Mouth. There’s fuzzed out guitars courtesy of Mica Levi and MANTUA, a dirging cover of ‘Black Is The Colour’ by Susu Laroche, a featherlight d&b remix of The Pastels by My Bloody Valentine and a rendition of the Scottish folk song ‘Leis A’ Bhata Dhubh Dharaich’ by Ian Nyquist featuring vocals from Iona Zajac

Additional Irish representation comes via Brownsauce’s atmospheric folk instrumental ‘Emptying (Circle)’, and Seamas Hyland’s ‘No Chance Of Rain’, a stunning mix of melodeon drones, a delicate drum machine beat, and samples from a weather forecast he heard in a jeep in Sierra Leone. All tied together with polyp’s own muffled commentary, it’s a treat.

That’s all for now. Catch you next time!