writing
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Book Review History has a habit of sanding down its sharpest edges. Movements become moments. Radicals become footnotes. The people who did the organising, the drafting, the strategising get compressed into a paragraph, if they are remembered at all. In Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights, Keisha N. Blain refuses that…
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Book Review Invisible Women is the kind of book that shifts your perspective in small, permanent ways. After reading it, everyday systems start to look slightly different. You begin to notice assumptions that once felt neutral. Caroline Criado Perez builds her argument around a deceptively simple premise. Much of the modern world has been designed…
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Book Review Ireland has produced political memoirs. It has produced literary fiction that dissects power. It has produced feminist scholarship rooted in academia. What it has rarely produced is a forensic cultural manifesto that drags an entire creative industry into the light and demands structural reform. Why Not Her? A Manifesto for Culture Change is…
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The UK government has formally launched the review of the BBC’s Royal Charter, the constitutional framework that sets the broadcaster’s mission, governance, public purposes and funding model. The current Charter expires at the end of 2027. The next Charter will define the BBC’s direction from January 2028 onwards. This is not routine administration but a…
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Our Rating 9/10 In a culture obsessed with noise, Dotts O’Connor chooses stillness. The alternative folk songwriter has built his reputation on restraint. Rooted in rural landscapes and the emotional weight they carry, his work inhabits the space between connection and isolation, routine and longing. Nothing feels forced. Nothing feels ornamental. His songs sound lived…
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Focus track: “Gang Signs” Our Rating: 7/10 THUMPER have always understood impact. Density. Volume. The physicality of sound. But Sleeping With The Light On suggests something more interesting than just noise. It suggests discipline. The album opens with “The Rip,” and the name is apt. It does not ease you in. It arrives with crunch…
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Our Rating: Nostalgia I have always considered Daft Punk to be one of the rare acts who understood mythology as well as melody. Their split five years ago felt less like a breakup and more like the end of a chapter in modern electronic folklore. They exited quietly, deliberately, without reunion bait or nostalgia merch…
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Our Rating 7/10 Soda Blonde – “Suit & Tie” I have always considered Faye O’Rourke to be one of Ireland’s finest and most undervalued vocalists. How a voice like hers has not travelled globally is something I will never fully understand. Perhaps it speaks less to talent and more to the chronic inability of Ireland’s…
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Our Rating: 10/10From the forthcoming album It’s About Time (March 6, 2026) There are entire stages of women’s lives that popular music still refuses to name. Peri-menopause is one of them. With “Young One,” Ndidi O does not just name it, she sits inside it. Quietly. Unflinchingly. Taken from her forthcoming album It’s About Time,…
The Industry Review 