writing
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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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I have read over the World Happiness Report 2026 a few times now. Full disclosure, I am neurodivergent, and sometimes I need to read, re-read, and then put something down and come back to it so my brain can properly take in what the data is actually telling us. What is the story and the…
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Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear feels perfectly calibrated for this cultural moment. A novel obsessed with nostalgia, memory and reinvention, it interrogates why modern society remains so addicted to romanticising the past. Part literary fiction, part cultural critique, the novel has already generated enormous attention ahead of its forthcoming film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway, who is…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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Dótts O’Connor sits in that space Irish music does best when it’s honest about itself. There’s no overproduction of identity, no chasing of trend cycles, just a steady pull toward storytelling that feels lived in rather than constructed. His work leans into narrative, not as a stylistic choice but as a necessity, shaped by place,…
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We reviewed Sean Griffin’s single “Be My Girl” a few months back, a track that hinted at something more stripped and more personal sitting just beneath the surface. Now, with his debut solo album People Are Mad out in the world, that shift comes fully into focus. After decades fronting The Ruffians and building a…
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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.…
The Industry Review 