Music Reviews
Albums, singles and live performances analysed beyond the hype. We explore artistry, authorship and the systems influencing what gets heard.
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8/10 Wallis Bird has never sounded particularly interested in perfection, and thank Christ for that. “Hold Tight!” works precisely because it feels alive. Messy in places. Urgent. Warm. Full of movement and breath and friction. In an era where so much contemporary folk-pop arrives vacuum-sealed and emotionally overmanaged, Wallis continues to sound gloriously human. Released…
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7/10 A Must-Watch, Must Listen To, and Must See Live Band! Akrobat’s new single “Dirty Gathering” arrives like a slow leak of tension through concrete. Nothing about it rushes to impress you. Instead, it coils itself gradually around atmosphere, restraint and unease, revealing a band increasingly comfortable in mood, texture and ambiguity rather than obvious…
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There’s a rare kind of artist who doesn’t simply write songs but builds emotional landscapes people quietly carry with them long after the music stops. Irish singer-songwriter Molly O’Mahony belongs firmly in that category. With her new album, O’Mahony delivers a body of work shaped by love, grief, uncertainty, nature, and the emotional static of…
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9/10 *Part of our throwback album review series. With Blindness, The Murder Capital have delivered the strongest and most fully realised record of their career so far. Not because it is cleaner or more commercially accessible, but because the band finally sound completely unconcerned with fitting neatly inside the increasingly exhausted “post-punk revival” label that…
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8/10 *Part of our throwback album review series. With Open Wide, Inhaler finally sound less concerned with escaping the shadow hanging over them and more focused on becoming the band they were probably always heading towards. For years, lazy discourse around the Dublin four-piece revolved around lineage rather than music. But by the time Open…
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Throwback Review 10/10 *Part of our throwback album review series. Looking back now, The Clearing feels like the album where Wolf Alice stopped trying to prove themselves to anybody. By the time the record arrived in 2025, the band had already survived the strange modern trajectory from indie darlings to Mercury Prize winners to one…
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8/10 There is something quietly cinematic about “Darlin’”, the new release from Irish collective AINM, but not in the overly polished or self-conscious way that term often gets thrown around. Instead, the track feels expansive because it understands atmosphere. It understands restraint. It allows space to exist between the notes. Originally beginning life as a…
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9/10 There’s a very fine line when artists cover Fix You. Get it wrong and it becomes karaoke wrapped in expensive production. Get it right and you uncover something hidden inside the song that listeners forgot was there. Sonaírí achieved the latter. Irish duo Sonaírí, consisting of Irish soprano Amie Dyer and tenor David Corr,…
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8/10 Daði Freyr has always occupied a curious space in modern pop. Too eccentric to be conventional chart-pop, too emotionally sincere to be dismissed as novelty, and too musically sharp to fade into the endless algorithmic sludge currently swallowing the genre whole. Like many others, you may have first discovered Daði in 2020 with his…
The Industry Review 