Irish songwriter Conor Kilkelly discusses the losses behind his second album, the strange instruments lurking within its arrangements and why direct patronage may offer independent musicians a way out of streaming’s economic dead end.

Kilkelly, the musical project of Irish songwriter Conor Kilkelly, has never been especially interested in taking the well-lit road.

Rooted in narrative songwriting and the Irish tradition of lament, his music wanders into stranger territory, bringing folk instrumentation into contact with theatrical arrangements, philosophical unease and a dark, occasionally mischievous sense of humour.

His second album, Solip, released on 2 May 2026, emerged in the aftermath of the deaths of two close friends. The record moves through grief, mania, heartache and the profoundly disorientating experience of discovering that loss has permanently altered the architecture of one’s life.

Musically, it is an ambitious and sometimes unsettling work. A bodhrán filled with pennies, a Japanese shamisen, bowed banjo, biscuit tins and metal pipes sit alongside violins, cello and choir. The result can feel intimate and tender one moment, then almost menacing the next.

Following his 2020 debut, The Prick & The Petal, Kilkelly has also continued to question how independent music is funded and valued. Rather than placing streaming platforms at the centre of his work, he makes his music freely available and advocates for a return to direct patronage between artists and listeners.

The Industry Review spoke with Conor Kilkelly about creating art from grief, abandoning convention in the studio, leaving Berlin and building a musical life outside the conventional industry machine.

The title Solip immediately suggests solipsism, solitude and being trapped within one’s own consciousness. What does the word mean to you?

Yes, spot on. It is short for solipsism. I hoped to avoid fully committing to such a pretentious title, so I chopped it in half and hoped nobody would clock it. But here we are.

I became quite fixated on the idea while studying philosophy in college. It struck a nerve, I suppose. Everyone goes through phases of feeling isolated or unseen as they truly are within themselves.

My friend passed away during a period between lockdowns. He suffered a psychotic break and took his own life. The isolation he must have felt is something I cannot fathom, but somehow I could come closer to intuiting it through the music.

The record began following the deaths of two close friends. At what point did writing become part of how you processed those losses?

When you are hit with emotions that feel as though they could crumble you, it is very handy to have an instrument.

Anger, sadness and strange lurking sensations you do not yet know how to describe, let alone process, can emerge more clearly through song. I find that, anyway.

If your heart breaks, you can cry on someone’s shoulder, but you can also put it into sounds that other people can take in. Occasionally, it resonates. Then you do not feel alone in whatever you are going through.

That shared song becomes a kind of antidote to solipsism.

Grief rarely moves in a neat or dignified line. Did you want the album to resist the sanitised ways grief is often represented?

As a child, I lost my dad to cancer. Children, though, are much wiser than we are. The grief was never hidden. It was life-altering and immensely sad, but even as a young child I understood that death was inevitable. It is as common as life.

We all know that, but we can spend decades trying to delude ourselves that somehow we will escape suffering.

The messy emotions accompanying grief need to be aired. The worst thing you can do with your mind is stifle it. Whatever is lurking needs outing.

You do go mad in grief, but you stay mad if you do not let it flow out.

Was there a song that proved particularly difficult to finish?

There was one that was 99 per cent recorded, but I did not finish it.

I am not sure what was holding me up. I think there was something untruthful lurking in the lyrics. It was too hopeless, and life, no matter what, is never hopeless.

Thinking back now, I suppose I sabotaged it.

Do not tell my producer. Sorry, Cameron.

Your writing is strongly narrative-driven and connected to the Irish traditions of storytelling and lament. How consciously do you draw upon that inheritance?

Any time I have tried to write consciously, it has been a disaster.

For me, songs are like cats. You have to play it cool with cats. When you meet a new one, the worst thing you can do is stroke it too soon. You have to let it sniff you out and inspect the furniture. Then you will be cuddling in no time.

To write, I have to convince myself that I am only playing around. That is how a trance-like state comes. You keep picking or strumming until something sounds new and feels good, right even. Then you grab paper and pen and write as quickly as you can before the conscious mind wakes up and ruins everything.

If you are lucky, you look down at the page and see something resembling a song.

I never think about the Irish tradition, or even what genre I am playing, while the song is forming. My phrase is: thinking is the enemy.

How a song like “Fionn’s Lament” or “The Tree & Me” emerges as a complete story that makes some semblance of sense, I have absolutely no idea.

A lot of writers like cats, you know.

There is a darker and more experimental musical language on Solip than on The Prick & The Petal. What gave you the confidence to push the arrangements further?

I had Jess Smith, from Rufus Coates and Jess Smith, in the studio while I recorded “Cabaret” for the first album. She is my favourite singer, and I knew I was already overreaching, so I needed her there for moral support.

She drank lots of wine and became very excited when we started experimenting. She kept egging on Cameron Laing, my co-producer at The Famous Gold Watch, and me. It was the most fun you can have in a studio.

When we began this album, I told Cam we should throw out every convention and go into full madness, making it up as we went.

It is scary because you do not know whether it will work, but it is also an exhilarating way to create.

The instrumentation is wonderfully peculiar, including a bodhrán filled with pennies, Japanese shamisen and bowed banjo. How did those sounds find their way onto the record?

My beloved drummer from the first album, David Michalke, decided to take a hiatus from music and moved city. I did not feel right asking anybody else to join the collaboration.

I had loved playing drums whenever the kit was free in my first punk band as a kid, so when we needed rhythm or lift, I closed my eyes and thought about exactly what I needed. Not what drum I needed, but what sound.

I experimented with biscuit tins filled with glass, pennies inside my sole drum, which was a bodhrán, and metal pipes struck against stone walls until I found what I wanted.

I toured Germany with that biscuit tin at my foot, but we eventually abandoned it in Darmstadt after nearly being impaled too many times.

The shamisen is played by the exceptional Shiomi Kawaguchi, whom I lived with, alongside David Stewart Ingleton. One day, David came to me excitedly and said, “Conor, I found a sound for you,” before proceeding to bow his banjo.

I do not know how I became lucky enough to call these people friends, let alone flatmates and collaborators. I owe them all.

You describe yourself as having “a taste for the strange”. What does strangeness allow you to express that conventional singer-songwriter music does not?

I have always loved slightly off-kilter singers. Tom Waits was a breath of fresh air to me. Captain Beefheart was also a significant influence when we rehearsed in a cabin in the woods outside Berlin for The Prick & The Petal.

If something sounds too familiar, you are doing something wrong. If you are making art, you cannot simply repeat what is already there.

You are responsible to your audience. You have to challenge them. Do not dumb anything down or condescend. Audiences are too clever for that. Give them the goods.

Whatever is inside you needs outing, no matter how strange or peculiar it may be. It is only strange because it is new.

Music is always meant to change.

Berlin played an important role in your development. What did the city give you, and why did you eventually leave?

There is no way I could have become a working musician without Berlin.

I tried to make it work in Dublin in 2013, but the cost of taxis alone, after missing the final bus home, soon put an end to that dream.

When I moved to Berlin, the city was chockablock with artists and public transport ran all night. My first room cost €220 a month. That is how you can live from songs and work your arse off playing whatever crap gigs you can find while going through the apprenticeship years.

I have no idea how anybody who is not a rich kid could do it now.

Berlin has changed too. Artists are being priced out. Ireland, though, is my home, and thanks to the derelict cottage grant, I have been able to make it my home again.

You make your music freely available and favour direct patronage over streaming platforms and record companies. Was that decision political, practical or necessary for survival?

I created a Patreon page to help crowdfund The Prick & The Petal. Otherwise, there was no way I could have afforded the studio.

To my enormous surprise, some of my patrons decided to stay, giving me a little each month to help me along. That small amount has sustained me when the months became lean. Sometimes it is how I bought groceries. It still is.

We know there is a great deal wrong with the direction music is taking. Streaming pays only the very top tier of artists. Those artists are generally pop, or at least familiar sounding, because record companies have become increasingly averse to risking money on stranger new work.

Where does that leave the 99 per cent of musicians who once might have made a living from art?

Who would sign the Sex Pistols today, or Nina Simone singing protest songs?

I think the accountants have a great deal to answer for in today’s culture. Risk aversion is a plague upon art.

Patronage can free us from that. The artist can make whatever they want, and listeners can scratch an itch they had forgotten needed attention.

Streaming has trained listeners to expect almost limitless access while musicians receive very little in return. Do audiences fully understand the consequences?

People have enough on their plates. Everyone is suffering. I do not expect people to spend their time thinking specifically about why artists are suffering.

There is a lot of darkness around us. We are living through the death throes of runaway capitalism. Monopolies are abundant, and it seems as though nobody sane is left at the wheel.

I do not know what to say, except that I wish we would expand the authority of citizens’ assemblies and bring a little more empathy into our decisions.

When psychopathic thinking is rewarded at the top, it is long past time to change who holds the power.

Musicians are now expected to behave as constant content creators. How do you protect the slower and more private work of songwriting?

The only way I can do it is by putting on a character. I speak as quickly as possible and get the information out.

You have to hide the side of yourself that writes. If the muse thought you were writing for the Meta crowd or TikTok, she would clam up quickly.

After carrying these songs privately for so long, what has it been like to hear listeners form their own relationships with them?

Getting these songs finished and paid for was so stressful that, after I finally released the album, I had somehow forgotten people would actually hear it.

The comments I have received are nothing short of miraculous to me. Strangers have reached out, along with people I had not spoken to in years.

It has made the whole thing worth every cent and every headache. I am deeply surprised and awestruck by how some people have taken to it.

Has Solip brought you to the other side of the experiences that created it, or does it remain an open wound?

One thing you discover as a songwriter is that every ghost, struggle and joy you felt strongly enough to capture in a song lives with you again for a little while every night you perform.

It is the most beautiful thing about the job. It makes the long journeys, makeshift sleeping arrangements and petrol-station sandwiches worthwhile.

The darker songs do not feel dark or sad onstage. They feel more like an exorcism.

You live the experience again through singing it, but the audience relieves you of it. You can see in their eyes whether it lands. When it does, you feel a sense of union.

It is the greatest feeling in the world.

If somebody listens to Solip from beginning to end, what do you hope remains after the final song?

That they are never alone.

What comes next for Kilkelly?

I am always scheming. Tours. A new home. County Clare.

But I am wholly aware that all you have to do to make God laugh is tell them your plans.