Our Rating 7/10

There’s a point in an artist’s career where the question shifts. It stops being about how big they can go and starts being about what they choose to hold onto once they’ve already been there. The Weight of the Woods sits right in that space.

This is Dermot Kennedy pulling everything inward. Not as a reaction, but as a decision. After the massive success and polish of Sonder, this record moves differently. The production is more restrained, more organic, built around space rather than momentum. Nothing is chasing a crescendo unless it earns it.

Written between Ireland and Nashville, the album carries that movement quietly. The Irish influence isn’t aesthetic or decorative. It’s structural. You hear it in the phrasing, in the pacing, in the way the songs unfold more like stories than set pieces. There’s patience to it.

“Funeral” lands early and sets the tone. Stripped back and direct, it holds the emotional centre of the record without trying to elevate itself into something bigger than it needs to be. It’s in that restraint that it hits hardest, and it stands out as the clearest expression of what this album is trying to do.

What’s happening across the record isn’t reinvention, more like recalibration.

Kennedy has always leaned into emotional clarity. That hasn’t changed. What has shifted is the level of control. There’s more space around the writing now, more trust in letting a line sit without pushing it further. The vocals are left more exposed, the arrangements more selective. It’s measured.

Lyrically, the album circles familiar ground, relationships, pressure, identity, but with a different weight behind it. There’s a grounding here that feels tied to real life rather than projection. Family, home, the quieter realities that sit underneath everything else. It doesn’t feel like an artist reaching outward. It feels like someone taking stock.

That said, this is where the record will divide listeners.

For those who came to Kennedy through the scale of earlier releases, there will be moments where this feels too contained. The peaks are fewer. The dynamics are softer. At times, it sits so comfortably in its own tone that it risks blending into itself.

This isn’t an album built for instant impact. It’s built as a body of work. Something that unfolds gradually rather than announcing itself upfront. There’s a quiet confidence running through it that suggests Kennedy is no longer interested in proving anything. The songs don’t reach for validation. They hold their position and let the listener decide.

That voice still cuts through when it needs to, carrying a directness that most artists spend years trying to manufacture.

In a landscape that rewards speed and scale, The Weight of the Woods takes a different route. It slows things down. It simplifies and trusts the material to carry itself.

Not perfectly. But deliberately.

Verdict:
A restrained, introspective record that trades scale for substance. It won’t land as instantly as his earlier work, and at points it leans too heavily into its own samey samey tempo, but when it connects, it does so with real weight.

Rating: 6 / 10

Standout Track:
“Funeral” sits as the emotional centre of the album, capturing its tone and intent with clarity and restraint.