writing
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Our Rating 8/10 Some songs arrive loudly. Others move quietly, like someone stepping into a room and simply standing there until everyone notices. “Grace”, the new single from Irish alt-pop artist Chubby Cat, belongs firmly in the second category. Built around a sparse electronic foundation, the track leans into atmosphere rather than immediacy. Soft synth…
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Across the global music industry, conversations about representation and equity have become impossible to ignore. Recently we explored these questions through a number of lenses, from Linda Coogan Byrne’s newly released book Why Not Her?, A Manifesto For Culture Change, which examines the dismal disparities across radio play and festival line-ups in the UK and…
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Our Rating 10/10 Music has long been described as a healing force. Not the clinical sort found in a pharmacy, but the quieter medicine that settles somewhere deep in the chest when the right song arrives at the right moment. When I pressed play on “Golden Thing,” the new single from West Cork songwriter Molly…
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In recent years, few cultural initiatives have reshaped Ireland’s conversation around identity and belonging as clearly as Black and Irish. What began as three simple words shared online quickly grew into something much larger. At a time when conversations about race and representation were intensifying across the world, the phrase captured an experience many people…
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February Signals: A Bigger Music Industry, and a More Exposed One By the time March arrived, February had already left a clear set of fingerprints across the music industry in the UK, Ireland and Europe. It was a month that celebrated scale, spectacle and global reach. It was also a month that quietly exposed the…
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At a certain point in life, time stops feeling abstract. It becomes physical. It lives in the body, in memory, in the quiet realisation that the person you once were is not the person you are becoming. For Ndidi O, that realisation sits at the centre of her new album It’s About Time, released March…
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Our Rating 10/10 flawless. Rosalía has spent years proving she can bend tradition and modernity into something uniquely hers. LUX is what happens when she stops proving and starts claiming. This is not a pop album chasing scale. It’s an album built for it. In interviews around the record, Rosalía said, “Llevo preparándome toda la…
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Our Rating 7/10 Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon doesn’t rap like he’s trying to impress you. He raps like he already knows he can. As of Now is long, loose, and deliberately personality-driven. It opens with humour. Not throwaway humour. Sharp, slightly absurd, meme-aware humour that immediately establishes tone. He understands the internet age of rap, but…
The Industry Review 