REVIEW: RADIE PEAT – STILL I LOVE HIM

There are voices you recognise within seconds. Radie Peat has one of them.

As a member of Lankum and ØXN, Peat has become one of the defining voices of this extraordinary period in Irish folk music. But on Still I Love Him, her first solo release, there is nowhere to disappear into the collective. Nor, apparently, does she need anywhere to hide.

Released through Rough Trade Records, Still I Love Him takes a traditional song and does something much more difficult than simply modernising it. It leaves its bones intact while changing the emotional temperature completely.

The version came to Peat through John Francis Flynn, who discovered it in the Irish Traditional Music Archive and wrote a melody for the words. Peat takes it from there, building the song around her extraordinary contralto and layers of her own voice.

And what a voice it is.

Peat doesn’t perform this song so much as inhabit it. There is an almost physical weight to her lower register, but the remarkable thing is how little she needs to do with it. There are no vocal gymnastics here, no attempt to prove the size of the instrument. She knows exactly what she’s holding.

That restraint becomes particularly important once you understand the story.

Still I Love Him is ostensibly a love song, but there is something deeply uncomfortable sitting underneath that description. Its woman remains emotionally attached to a man whose treatment of her becomes increasingly grim.

The contradiction is the song.

Love and suffering aren’t separated politely into victim and villain, past and present, before and after. They’re allowed to exist beside one another, which is far more unsettling.

Peat doesn’t rescue the woman from an old song by imposing a clean 2026 conclusion upon her either. She lets her remain complicated. She can love someone and recognise what that love is costing her. She can be wounded without being reduced to the wound.

That’s where the performance becomes particularly powerful.

There is darkness here, certainly, but Peat doesn’t confuse darkness with melodrama. The arrangement has space in it. Her voice multiplies and gathers around itself, sometimes sounding less like conventional harmony than several versions of the same woman occupying the room at once.

It feels old and startlingly contemporary at the same time.

That contradiction has become one of the great strengths of the current generation of Irish traditional musicians. The most interesting artists working in the form aren’t treating tradition as something preserved behind glass. They’re getting their hands into it, questioning it, stretching it and sometimes making it deeply strange again.

Peat has already helped do that spectacularly with Lankum and ØXN.

What Still I Love Him suggests is that her solo work may give us something different again.

Without the enormous sonic architecture we associate with Lankum around her, you notice just how commanding she is in stillness. Almost six minutes pass without the song needing to chase you for attention.

If this is the beginning of Radie Peat as a solo artist, it’s a formidable one.

Radie Peat Live Dates

3rd Nov 2026 – Union Chapel – London – UK
20th Nov 2026 – Vicar St. – Dublin – IE
31st Jan 2027 – Paradiso – Amsterdam – NL

Pre-sale Thursday 9th July at 10am. General sale Friday 10th July at 10am.

Stream Still I Love Him: https://radiepeat.ffm.to/still

📸 Daniel Archer

The Industry Review rating: 9/10