new-music
-
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…

-
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…

-
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…

-
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,…

-
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…

-
Our Rating: 10/10 There is a fine line between evolution and repetition in pop, and Olivia Rodrigo has spent the last few years walking it carefully. “Drop Dead” lands as a calculated step forward, not a reinvention, but a tightening of what already works. At surface level, the track holds all the hallmarks of her…

-
There is a particular kind of pop song that does not just arrive; it carries people with it. With “So Long, Solo”, Collette Brady-McEntee steps firmly into that space. Written within a collaborative songwriting environment and shaped by the hands of experienced writers, the track holds both scale and substance. It is built on connection,…

-
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.…

-
Our Rating 10/10 Some songs arrive loudly, demanding attention. Others move differently. “Intimacy” doesn’t push its way in. It draws you closer, slowly, until you realise you’ve stepped into something far more exposed than expected. This is Loah working with intent and control. The production is stripped back but deliberate, built around space rather than…

