New Irish Music: September/October 2025

Like so many others, I was heartbroken to learn of Manchán Magan’s passing at the beginning of this month. So much has already been said so beautifully in tribute to this one-of-a-kind writer and documentary maker, so I won’t go on too much here, but I do just want to echo the sentiment that the cultural imprint he’s left on this island will linger for a long, long time.

As a champion of the Irish language, who illuminated its in-built poetry to simultaneously teach us how to connect more deeply with the land around us, he made ancient wisdom and mythology feel accessible and electrifying. As he put it himself, he always felt like he had one foot in the otherworld, but he always made sure the portal was open for the rest of us too. Even in the midst of his final weeks on this plane, the grace with which he spoke about his own mortality was quietly inspiring.

I think Kathy Scott of The Trailblazery put it best when she wrote of her friend and collaborator: “Manchán arrived in this life like a comet, ablaze with purpose and utterly devoted to his dán, his soul gift. He was a wizard draoi and cultural laoch who lit up so many pathways between language, land, spirit and imagination. He came to remind us of the magic hidden in plain sight and the wild beauty alive in our mother tongue, ár máthairtheanga.”

I first came across Magan through Blindboy’s interview with him back in 2020, which I’d really recommend checking out if you haven’t heard it already. In it, they spoke about his early life and time spent travelling around Africa, the “psychedelic origins of Irish folklore”, and his book 32 Words for Field (Lost Words of the Irish Landscape). Another subject they touched on was on the linguistic and musical connections between Ireland and the SWANA Region, something Magan would later explore in his collaboration with musician Clare Sands, accompanying her mix of Middle Eastern and traditional Irish fiddle playing with descriptive notes on the links between words in Arabic, Sanskrit and Gaeilge.

Magan regularly interacted with the Irish music scene. In 2022, he shared a cover of Kneecap’s ‘C.E.A.R.T.A’ to help raise funds for a gym in Palestine, and in 2024, he featured on their album Fine Art, his expressive mix of Gaeilge and Béarla peppered through the trad-flute-sampling hip-hop of ‘Drug Dealin Pagans’. He once even joined them on stage in shamanic attire. In their tribute to him, they wrote: “Perhaps unwillingly, he was the foremost cultural ambassador for our generation and instrumental in the resurgence of Irish language and culture.”

He collaborated with Brían Mac Gloinn of Ye Vagabonds too, asking him to create some soundscapes and music in response to words that appeared in his book Sea Tamagochi, which explored forgotten maritime terms and coastal customs. That project, and the conversations they had around it, would go on to influence the creation of Ye Vagabonds’ 2022 album Nine Waves. The Irish word gleo, which appeared in that book and refers to the loud and ominous sound of the sea, also informed the naming of Limerick’s Gleo label, whose debut release I covered last month.

Multiple prominent Irish musicians formed a guard of honour at Magan’s funeral, including Lisa O’Neill, who preluded her rendition of ‘Old Note’ with words about the wisdom of John Moriarty and the accordion player Tony McMahon, who, in relation to the slow air ‘Port na bPúcaí’, once spoke about Irish music’s capacity to connect us to something deeper, older, and more spiritual within the landscape. They’re words that resonate with so much of what Magan sought to express in his work. Whether stating that he saw Ireland “not as a country, but as a kind of spell”, or describing the pre-historic hill fort of Dún Aonghasa as a Bronze Age rave site, there was an inherent musicality in so much of what he did. Its ripples will be felt for years to come. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

This month’s New Irish Music round-up is a little late, and I’m going to take a small break after this one before returning at the end of November. Life’s been busy and I’ve been circling the burnout drain a bit, but rest assured, the next batch of releases is already looking great. In the meantime, there’s lots to tuck into below.

I’d also love it if you checked out the mix I recorded recently for NTS’ Supporter Radio series, a trip into Ireland’s experimental undergrowth loosely anchored by ideas relating to landscape, lore and the search for ‘thin places’. While piecing it together, and writing about some of the releases in last month’s newsletter, I binged Magan’s podcast series on John Moriarty, The Bog Shaman, and found a lot of inspiration in there. Perhaps you will too!

Right then. Without further ado, let’s get into it. Dive in below!

Eistigí.

Throwing Shapes - Throwing Shapes [WRWTFWW Records]

Throwing Shapes is the new project from Gareth Quinn Redmond, Méabh McKenna and Ross Chaney. On their debut album – which, full disclosure, I wrote the bio for, so sorry for repeating myself here – the trio of alchemise 18th century wire-strung harp experiments with modular synthesis and brushed percussion to create an ambitious suite of electronic impressionism that shimmers at the intersection of spiritual jazz, post-rock, ambient and deconstructed chamber music.

With previous album credits and live contributions for the likes of John Francis Flynn, Villagers, Aoife Nessa Frances, Ye Vagabonds and Maija Sofia between them, the trio first met in 2023 and bonded over a shared desire to make electronic music in a collaborative band setting. Guided by the distinctive timbre of McKenna’s Mullaghmast harp, a replica of what would have played in Ireland in the 1700s prior to its near total erasure as a result of British colonialism, they built on melodic ideas and experimental improvisations during studio sessions in Stoneybatter, before carefully crafting the fully realised versions in post-production.

In a word, it’s gorgeous. In ‘Chosen Talk’, McKenna’s hammered brass string motif reaches heavenward, levitating like a feather might on a breeze of drums, synth flourishes and soul-stirring bass clarinet and saxophone swells from Steve Welsh, who appears at intervals throughout the record. Resting at the heart of the album’s eight tracks, you may detect hints of Nala Sinephro, Duval Timothy and Mary Lattimore in its DNA, but what the single best illuminates is the synergy at play in Throwing Shapes. In opening track ‘Calyx’, sustained strings chime and weave around featherlight percussion and synthesised atmospherics. ‘Meant To Say’ is a mesmerising vignette of tape-burnt ambience reminiscent of William Basinski, while ‘Sonnoh’ makes use of the natural pitch bend in the harp as its hammered bass notes mingle, glitch and buzz with modular effects and delay, echoing in the air like psychedelic church bells.

Elsewhere, in ‘So and So’, the harp itself feeds into a tape machine, its delicate voicings warped and distorted over gentle beds of static. ‘Clearly Faded’ conjures Sakamoto’s melodic majesty over pulsing tom drums, while ‘Leave It Out’ layers reversing signals into a rich, droning meditation. It all comes together on ‘Lo and Behold’, a dazzling closer that builds and builds on its kosmische synths and harp string soundscaping to a spiritual jazz peak.

Ian Nyquist - Gilded [Flood]

There’s more mystery to the bodhrán than meets the eye. The handheld frame drum is often dubbed the heartbeat of traditional Irish music; played with a tipper stick, its deep thrums and tripletting rhythms reliably send shivers down the spines of sessions the world over. But its origins have been the subject of great debate over the years. Where did this iconic percussion instrument come from, really? Was it played by ancient Celts? Was it an agricultural tool or winnowing sieve? A sort of tambourine? A combination of all three?

Unlike Fintan Vallely, who recently published Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán, I’m not qualified to make claims about its past, but if you asked for a glimpse into its future, I’d point you towards Ian Nyquist’s Gilded. The Dublin-based composer’s new album – released on Glasgow-via-Cork label Flood, formerly an outpost for all things “hard drum” – recontextualises the instrument entirely, making use of digital modelling software to create shapeshifting electronic music imbued with its uniquely expressive qualities.

The concept is quite simple: Nyquist hooked his bodhrán up to a contact mic, which in turn fed the sound of his playing into a computer, enabling timbres and textures to transform in real time. In ‘Intro’ and ‘Shroud’, this manifests as slow-moving bells, which seem to emit beams of light with each rhythmic chime. ‘Jig’ and ‘Serpent’ might well transport you to a trad session in some distant galaxy, their beats familiar yet uncanny – metallic, mercurial and laced with tonal complexity.

You’d be forgiven for thinking ‘Reel’ was the work of a techno producer; on the right system, its deep, muffled beat could make walls shake. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that the album was mastered by none other than Room 40’s Lawrence English, an artist with significant priors in the department of sonic complexity and heft. ‘Alchemy’, ‘5/4’ and 7/4’ spiral around complex time signatures like classics in the PAN catalogue, the bodhrán assuming the the role of a glittering deconstructed club tool. Meanwhile, Barker fans will delight in the rhythmic shimmer of ‘Ouroboros’

There are some great vocal moments too. Cork sean-nós singer Lorcan Mac Mathúna does a spellbinding rendition of 18th-century love song ‘Úna Bán’ over Nyquist’s tectonic drones and gossamer light melodic textures. Iona Zajac ends it all on ‘Leis a’ bháta’, an old Scots Gaelic rowing song I first heard sung by The Sound Of Mull on Ian Lynch’s Fire Draw Near podcast, and which becomes a dreamstate electronic lullaby here, propelled by the ethereal thud of Nyquist bodhrán, surging ever forward, the past and all its mystery in tow.

pôt-pot - Warsaw 480km [Felte Records]

Klaus Dinger never used the term “motorik” to describe the style of drumming he pioneered in Neu! “That sounds more like a machine, and it was very much a human beat,” he said. “It’s a feeling, like a picture, like driving down a long road or lane. It is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion.”

Those words barrel through my head as I listen to Warsaw 480km, the debut album from Lisbon-via-Cork quintet pôt-pot. Built mostly out of demos written during a period of physical and emotional freefall for vocalist and drummer Mark Waldron-Hayden – who started the project as a solo endeavour back in 2020 – these ten tracks imbue krautrock, proto-punk and ‘60s psychedelia with a palpable sense of movement and humanity. Fleshed out during full-band studio sessions, there’s a physicality at play here that packs even the most succinct lyrical loops with resonant urgency.

After the intro field recording of ‘132 Spring St.’, ‘22° Halo’ gets things going with a driving beat and the first taste of Elaine Malone’s droning harmonium, which weaves its way around the album like an endlessly undulating road. It carries the coarse guitar parts and pulsing basslines provided by Mykle Oliver Smith, Sara Leslie and Joe Armitage, and underscores the vocal harmonies that mix hypnotic monotony with rousing howls. ‘Sextape’ sighs and purrs with psychedelic swagger, while ‘I AM!’ channels Velvet Underground-y grit as it chugs toward infinity, fading out over Waldron-Hyden’s deadpan refrain: “This is the last time.”

All across the record there’s a sense of someone powering through grief and despondency, rolling with the punches and emerging from the other side, not exactly unscathed, but not down yet. You might hear it in the smoked-out surges of ‘Hot Scene’, the acid-dipped drift of ‘The Lights Are On’, or in the bluesy slow-burn of ‘Can’t Handle It’. It’s most acute in the closing track, which oscillates over fuzzed-up guitars between drowsy implorations: “It’s not lethal to change your life / I can’t seem to change your life”.

The album’s title came from a conversation Waldron-Hyden had with the driver who took him to collect and deliver his father’s ashes, about a long drive he took through Poland at night, and the flicker of hope that came from seeing the road sign for the country’s capital, not close, but not unreachable either. It’s a feeling channeled into the track ‘WRSW’, the record’s motorik highlight, its thrumming beat, guitars and organs underpinning a vocal hook that powers through uncertainty in search of promise: “How can we get there? Can we get there?”

Junior Brother - The End

13 years since releasing his first suite of homespun recordings, and six since he ventured miles beyond the parish ditches on his debut album, Pull The Right Rope, Ronan Kealy hits a new milestone with The End. The Kerryman’s third LP as Junior Brother lures us into an uncanny rural soundworld, where his bardic avant-folk is stretched to its limits and his musings on modern dread are filtered through a disorienting lens inspired by folklore and the otherworldly music of fairy forts.

We step into one such rath in ‘Welcome To My Mountain’. After a disquieting intro of tin whistle, accordion,, bodhrán and guitar, Kealy extracts words from a manuscript found in UCD’s dúchas archive, in which a man recounts his story of becoming trapped in one on a hallucinatory walk home, the landscape transforming and swallowing him whole. It heaves and hyperventilates, with Kealy conjuring palpable anxiety from each instrument, and extra heft coming courtesy of John “Spud” Murphy’s production.

As ever, Kealy’s distinctive yowl carries the record as lyrics confront themes such as the rise of far-right rhetoric and internet-fuelled bigotry (‘Small Violence’, ‘Today My Uncle Told Me’) and the mental toil of pandemic lockdowns (‘Week End’, ‘Plague Medal’), during which time most of these songs were written. Centrepiece ‘Take Guilt’ examines shame and privilege in one the LP’s most straightforwardly tuneful moments, while ‘Start Digging’ taps into his most experimental proclivities, his voice contorting with strange theatrics over fidgety string plucks and mandolin spasms – “Start digging til’ you see what living is.”

‘Old Bell’ sounds like Kealy’s answer to a smoked-out trip-hop track, its looping acoustic guitar, downtempo beat, collage-like instrumental trills, and booming low-end carrying lyrics that hold the album’s core message in its palm – “Someone must sing things that are hard to listen to. Listen to me, I’ll sing you something more real than real.”

‘New Road’ features the album’s only guest musician, with Lankum’s Ian Lynch adding uillean pipes over Kealy’s electronic organ keys and sub-bass, his words reverberating with anguish as he reflects on the motorway that was approved to be built through his family home and its surroundings. Having spent more time than he had there since childhood while writing the record, he now saw the landscape, with all its magic, mystery and memory, threatened with destruction. As he packed his bag to go back to Dublin post-pandemic, the life he’d known and loved was scheduled to be bulldozed by the “the pace of new life” and “the racket of a million things”.

Much has been made before of Kealy’s similarities to acts like Richard Dawson, Captain Beefheart and Joanna Newsom, and those comparisons do linger a little in The End, but what this album really shows is his position as one of modern Irish music’s true originals. As he embarks down this new road, one wonders where next it will lead him, down supernatural passageways and uncanny landscapes, where the otherworldly folk music bends to his will.

V/A - A Litany Of Failures: Volume V

A Litany Of Failures started out in 2016 as a split EP between four DIY bands based around Ireland: Galway’s Oh Boland, Belfast’s Junk Drawer, and Dublin’s Shrug Life and That Snaake. The tape release was accompanied by a joint tour that summer, and established the framework from which this now essential compilation series emerged. Now on its fifth edition, A Litany Of Failures has evolved to provide periodic snapshots of an islandwide independent music scene – a scratched lens survey of an ever-changing DIY soundscape that’s kept afloat by collaboration and a community-focused ethos.

Regular AOA readers will recognise at least half of the names in this latest 21-track dispatch, which encompasses everything from psych-rock, post-punk and no wave to avant-folk, experimental pop and oddball electronics. If their debut album wasn’t enough, pôt-pot get things going here with the lysergic proto-punk of ‘Hot Scene’. The Lisbon-via-Cork quintet’s harmonium player and backing vocalist Elaine Malone, aka Mantua, ends things later with ‘White Hands Over Me’, a banshee’s lament that echoes out of a dark and cavernous space, carried on reverb-soaked tide of eerily droning guitar.

I Dreamed I Dream’s ‘Banana Sushi’ begins as a snarling satirist punk jam, taking aim at a sinister “self made man” before descending into full blown murder fantasy. Vocal quartet Landless’ take on ‘Love Is Pleasing’ – a song popularised by both Shirley Collins and The Dubliners – is a typically arresting rendition that paints regret and fading romance in gorgeous four-part harmonies and mournful organ accompaniment. Róis swaps the sean-nós recalibrations of 2024’s MO LÉAN for mercurial electronica in ‘Ear Lobes’, before E The Artist channels Dean Blunt and Replica-era OPN on the brief but wonderful ‘AYŞE’.

Rún – whose debut album of burnt-out doom folk psychedelia blew my mind last month – stitch sampled percussion, sub-bass throbs, synthetic drones and spectral sound collage around Tara Boath Mooney’s tale of magic and metamorphosis. I love the sweetness of The PVP’s shoegazing in ‘The Knife’, the lullaby wooziness of Ana Palindrome’s ‘Wednesday’, and the restlessness of Crying Loser’s ‘Dem Jobs’, an early album highlight the channels post-rock originators like Tortoise and Slint as much as it does Connemara’s Trá Pháidín. I could go on, but honestly it’s best you just tuck in for yourself. There’s no better primer for Irish alternative music in 2025 than this.

bog band - Moonlighting / Apryl Fools

Prefab Sprout for the bedroom pop generation, Dublin duo bog band, aka Stephen Sorensen and Isaac Tomkin Clarke, will release their debut album in November. To whet the appetite, they’ve shared two singles over the past month. ‘Moonlighting’ is a typically tuneful jewel made up of jangly guitars, melodica trills and a simple beat that shuffles and clicks like a Casio preset. It all underscores Sorensen’s tender-hearted vocals, which evoke Paddy McAloon and The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan at their most lovelorn and sincere, but with a silky mellifluousness that’s his own.

‘Apryl Fools’ taps into a more upbeat sophisti-pop mode, all bright string synths and shreddy guitars, complimenting a chorus that hasn’t left my head since I first heard it. If these two do it for you, go back to 2024’s Vanity Project EP – which I wrote about here - and find more heart-on-sleeve loveliness to tide you over until the album’s out.

Sorensen’s new single as Stephen Star is equally sweet. A folky number featuring Henry Earnest, Nashpaints, Ellie O’Neill and others, it hits like an early-morning stroll in the sun – a quiet moment before real life kicks in; a promise that something new might be just around the corner.

Na Píobairi Uilleann - Mná na bPíob Uilleann: Volume 2

I won’t pretend to know what makes a piping tune work on a technical level, but hook me to an IV drip of drones and chanters and I’ll happily transcend for hours on end. I might not speak the lingo, but more and more I’ve found myself magnetised by the uillean pipes as an instrument that threads Ireland’s folk tradition to its contemporary experimental soundscape. To truly appreciate the latter, it helps to spend more time with the former.

This new suite from Na Píobairi Uilleann sits proudly in that camp. The society’s second volume of work spotlighting the island’s female pipers finds six players blazing through a suite of reels, jigs, airs and hornpipes. Like a good session, it’s the sort of stuff that stimulates the senses and stirs the soul. I was stopped in my tracks by the ornamental pitch bends in ‘The Wise Maid (Reel)’ played by Lottie Cullen, and thrilled by the way Colleen Shanks’ ‘The Flax Lament, Sean Reid’s (Reels)’ feels like it’s about out to spin off its axis and freewheel away.

Some may recognise the ‘Old Hag You Have Killed Me’ jig from The Bothy Band’s catalogue, played with equal parts vibrancy and elegance here by Louise Mulcahy before her take on the ‘Bean Dubh A’Ghleanna’ air. Deb Quigley’s ‘An Druimin Donn Dileas, The Mountain Hornpipe’, Sheila Friel’s ‘Scatter The Mud, Kissing & Drinking, Morrison’s’ and Jane Walls’ take on the harp tune ‘Carolan’s Concerto’ are all standouts, but honestly, the whole thing rips, so just let yourself get swept away in its current.

TRM (The Redneck Manifesto) - Grushy

Irish instrumental rock originators The Redneck Manifesto return with a stripped-back line-up, an abbreviated name, and a renewed sense of groove. Once a sextet, now a trio comprising Matthew Bolger, Niall Byrne and Richie “Jape” Egan, the outfit’s sixth LP distils their sound into its purest state – a seven-track suite of interlocking guitar licks, crunching basslines and brightly lit textures that illuminates a creative synergy that still sparks after almost three decades.

Look, you’d be forgiven for maybe feeling a little dissatisfied at first; the music in Grushy doesn’t bear the restless dynamism that made earlier albums like thirtysixstrings and I Am Brazil so exciting. But once you realise that that’s sort of the point, the magic starts to reveal itself. After the departure of founding drummer Mervyn Craig, and a period spent wondering how they would continue as a band at all, a series of studio sessions in Dublin and Malmö, where two thirds of them live, found them jamming out instinctively over simple, metronomic beats, following their riffs down more languid routes with a playful psych-funk spring in their step.

The results may be more restrained, but you can really hear how much fun they’re having here, and the feeling is properly infectious. It’s a pleasure to go walkabout with ‘Off The Hook’ and ‘Hidden Hands’, which snake and strut like HD-rendered Unknown Mortal Orchestra tunes. Synthetic flourishes and electronic effects let the whole thing levitate, especially in tracks like the ‘Aggro’ and ‘Tonglen’. TRM laid the groundwork for a generation of post- and math-rock bands in Ireland, including Alarmist and Enemies, whose vibrant DNA you might detect in the title track and ‘Pass It On’.

In 2004, TRM released ‘We Still Got It’. 21 years later, that remains the case, and if this excellent interview with TPOE podcast from last month is anything to go by, this recalibrated trio isn’t going away anytime soon either. The energy might be different this time round, but there’s a buoyancy to it all that’s showing no signs of deflation yet, so long may it float.

V/A - Classic Hiss: Boreens & Backroads

The set-up for Classic Hiss: Boreens & Backroads is fairly simple: find 14 indie-rock and experimental musicians from around Ireland; ask them to cover tunes by Pavement or David Berman; put them all together in a compilation; donate the proceeds to Palestinian aid organisations and legal funds for activists. Job’s a goodun.

The crew behind the release – and its follow-up that’s due later this year – have pulled together an impressive cast here, with DIY underground fixtures appearing next to new and emerging names, all held together with slacker threads and lo-fi fasteners. Some stay loyal to the source material, like Oh Boland and Aching Fauns & Shannon Duvall’s fuzz-drenched takes on the Wowee Zowee tunes ‘Grave Architecture and Kennel Districts’, Fly Parts’ bittersweet ‘How To Rent A Room’, and Junk Drawer & MayKay’s brilliantly messy rendition of ‘Cut Your Hair’.

Berman’s heartbreaking cocktail of ennui and pathos pairs well with Maija Sofia’s hushed croon on ‘Pretty Eyes’, while Cormorant Tree Oh puts a typically eerie spin on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’s ‘Stop Breathin’’. Other covers go way off piste: Katie Gerardine O’Neill steps into the role of Silver Jews’ titular ‘Suffering Jukebox’ with her murky concoction of malfunctioning vocal manipulations, ghostly keys and sad machine beats. Enola Christ Metalizer extracts the lyrics from Pavement’s ‘Brix Job’ and uses some tool or another to make US presidents alive and dead say them back over some banjaxed breakbeats. Fair enough! Here’s to the next edition.

Afterwardness - Ding Dong [Diet Of Worms]

Formed in 2020 from the ashes of ‘90s punk bands Pet Lamb, Female Hercules and The Idiots, Afterwardness are an experimental psych-noise trio from Dublin with a knack for improvised skronk and discordant supercuts.

Their latest effort for the Diet Of Worms label – which has released not one but two excellent compilations of ‘Louie Louie’ covers for Gaza in the past year – is their scuzziest yet. ‘Collage 1’ sounds like someone hit record in the practice room soundcheck – a feeling that returns later in ‘Location 2’ – its clattering drums and frazzled electronics tickling the receptors in my brain that crave that sort of thing. ‘Eek’ is a 17-minute psych-rock slow burn that rides a simple drum beat along the droning murk toward the cosmos.

‘Location 1’ mixes plinking kalimba and distant flute reverberations with a metallic clang, like a shonky homemade gamelan. ‘Collage 2’ stitches raw recordings of racketing rock outs, pianos, acoustic guitars, voices and static into a dizzying concoction, before ‘24.7’ throws everything into the blender and pours it over a pounding rhythm at the album’s feverish peak. Headscrambling stuff all round.

UOUS - Scrawled [Cruel Nature]

Regular AOA readers will already be familiar with the members of UOUS. Fling the discographies of The Last Sound, Whirling Hall Of Knives, Nwyvre and Decal into a blender and you’ll end up with Scrawled, a suite of scuzzy psychedelia cut from a series of improvised live jams. Assuming a rock band formation – guitar, bass, drums, vocals – the quartet drench it all in effects, industrial distortion and dubwise echoes across nine noisy cuts.

Barry Murphy’s metallic howls cut through the static like brightly-coloured lightning shards in ‘Total Decline’, becoming somewhat more human in the kaleidoscopic psych roller ‘Mocking Tones’. ‘Abort’ is a strobing jackhammer, while ‘Cut In Half’, takes the pace down to an eerie chug. ‘Scrawled’ and ‘Seal Is Broken’ conjure Suicide and Throbbing Gristle before we blast off into the blissful clamour and fuzz of the closing triptych.

Barnburner - see and sleep

Pippa Molony and David Mac Dhubháin are back with a new single as Barburner. I loved the eerie avant-pop and ambient dreamweaving of the former’s Hungry Ghost EP last year, and I’m just as won over by the open-hearted songwriting here. Molony’s lyrics, delivered with gentle, diaristic pathos, paint an intimate portrait of yearning and regret, all draped over a slow burn indie-folk canvas that’ll please fans of early Alex G, Big Thief, Duster and Grouper’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill.