My recommended best records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.
Album of the month:
They Are Gutting a Body of Water – LOTTO
Philadelphia shoegaze band TAGABOW (for short) bring an palpable urgency to the genre, along with a smoggy nineties’ alt-rock style on their fourth record LOTTO.
While shorning off their electronic and experimental edge in favour of pristine distortion, hypnotic riffs and guitar fuzz, They Are Gutting a Body of Water recall OG shoegaze innovators My Bloody Valentine in their guitar expansiveness.
There are also sonic shades of and US alt-rock ’90s bands like Slint and Nada Surf (the spoken word draws the comparison to that band’s biggest hit ‘Popular’).
LOTTO is up there with the most thrilling guitar rock records of the year, tickling a very particular itch, channelling the best of alternative rock sounds of the last 30 years which TAGABOW smash into their own unique formation in the process.
They Are Gutting A Body Of Water play Dublin’s Whelan’s in February.
Rory Sweeney – Old Earth
Rory Sweeney follows up last year’s Carlos Danger Irish Hash Mafia Irish rap mixtape celebration with a second solo album made over five years – a followup to 2022 debut Trash Catalogue, and this is also stacked with some of the same rappers along with contemporary songwriting peers.
Old Earth is not a club record – its ambient and electronic explorations are inspired by Stone Tape Theory, a residual haunting theory that supernatural phenomena such as ghosts and unexplained activity imprints itself on physical places and materials.
Old Earth is said to be “a meditation on time, decay, memory, and myth in the digital age. The album maps a dream logic that connects the natural world, early internet mysticism, Irish folklore, and the quiet violence of technological evolution.”
Guests include RÓIS, Saoirse Miller, Emby, Curtisy, Ahmed, With Love.; Ushmush, Roo Honeychild, Risteárd ÓhAodha, Emily Beattie and Julia Louise Knifefist.
With influences drawn from the output of Autechre, Enya, The Haxan Cloak, Steve Reich and Oneohtrix Point Never, there are expression of supernatural breakbeat experimentations on the changeling of ‘Old As Time Itself’ with RÓIS, bells and synths prettiness on ‘Morning Song’ with ÓhAodha, sprawling ambient dreaminess on opener ‘Entrance Places’ Saoirse Miller, and contributions from RÓIS and ÓhAodha and the as Gaeilge banger in ‘Ruh Roh’, with Aran Islands rapper Ushmush and Club Comfort DJ and producer Roo Honeychild.
It was a timely release, a piercing of the veil is at its fullest, and serves as a Samhain-induced trip. Sweeney is a music connector, drawing in those from Ireland’s fertile underground music scene to work alongside him. Old Earth it may be, but this is sound of the new soil.
Just Mustard – WE WERE JUST HERE
The third album from Dundalk alternative rockers Just Mustard released on Partisan Records is the follow up to 2018’s Wednesday and their 2022 Partisan Records debut Heart Under. Lead single ‘Polyanna’ was the band’s first song in three years.
The band’s trademark metallic and monochrome sonics are very much in place, along with a wider emotional depth, in contrast to the preoccupations of grief and longing.
WE WERE JUST HERE is “inspired by club spaces and physical joy, the songs strive for immediacy and feeling,” and much of their appeal remains the contrast soaring melodies of Katie Ball and the tense noise-scraping instrumentals that snake beneath her voice, the magnetic push and pull of striving for warmth and connection in a fumbling cold world.
The band play 3Olympia Theatre on May 1st 2026 and there is an extensive tour schedule ongoing now for the band.
Lily Allen – West End Girl
For her first album in seven years, Lily Allen takes us through the dissolved story of her marriage to actor David Harbour with an album of direct diaristic confessional songwriting with electronic and orchestral songwriting that feels partly inspired by Brat, and is filled with autobiographical-feeling salacious revelations about how the marriage fell apart through open-relationship, deceit and jealousy.
Come for the story, stay for the superior pop bangers? Yes, please.
West End Girl was made in 10 days with musical director Blue May and features production from Chrome Sparks, Kito, Leon Vynehall and Seb Chew. Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes also plays guitar on ‘4Chan Stan.’
It was the main subject of last week’s Nialler9 Podcast:
Bricknasty – Black’s Law
The Ballymun punk-jazz band’s music gives D’Angelo from Dublin vibes, while pulling from Irish trad alongside its jazz origins. Their latest mixtape/EP release Black’s Law intends to be “a visceral exploration of faith, political disillusionment, and the volatility of human nature.”
Made after a recalibration of the band’s personnel which prompted “a radical reset”, and featuring guests Aby Coulibaly, F3miii and Willa Lee, Black’s Law is as nebulous as it is hypnotic, a kaleidoscopic mix of live band rap production, gospel and soul-torn psychedelia, drenched in Irish folk and metamorphic vocals.
- 25 Nov – Limelight 2, Belfast, Northern Ireland
- 27 Nov – Kasbah, Limerick, Ireland
- 28 Nov – Mike The Pies, Listowel, Ireland
- 29 Nov – Roisin Dubh, Galway, Ireland
- 03 Dec – Cyprus Avenue, Cork, Ireland
- 04 Dec – The Vic, Tramore, Ireland
- 06 Dec – 3Olympia, Dublin, Ireland
Blawan – SickElixir
Jamie Roberts is known for his crushing atmospheres and dark dance music, but recent years have seen the Blawan project move in more experimental sound design directions, and that trend continues here on SickElixir, a gnarled collection of gritty electronic productions, that buzzes, rips, whispers, distorts and bangs.
Maykay – Maykay
The Fight Like Apes singer Maykay has long guested on other people’s records. From her time singing with Le Galaxie to regular collaborations with Jerry Fish Mik Pyro and Elaine Mai, MayKay has regularly kept up her singing personality on record and live, as well as developing her hosting duty skills on Other Voices for the last 10 years.
The Irish artist finally released a debut solo album after 20 years playing music, a record is informed and about relationships in all their forms and musically – it’s a rock record, a pop LP, an alternative album, an indie release, a blues album, with electro-pop and everything in-between.
The songs are informed by toxic men, tumultuous dating experience, relationship regret, forgiveness and the influential presence of her recently deceased dad, who informs the album’s poignant closing elegy ‘Funerals’, with Maykay writing lovingly about their bond of enjoying such morbid occasions.
It’s a novelty to hear MayKay accompanied with a more traditional production than the “no-guitar” ruleset synthpop of her Fight Like Apes past, but if there’s anyone who can bring these disparate styles together it’s Maykay, whose vibrant voice and shades presented in it, are a suitable foil for Ian MacFarlane’s varied arrangements.
Maykay plays Whelan’s on December 18th.
A Litany Of Failures – Volume V
A Litany of Failures released the fifth volume of its independent Irish compilation series, intended to document the independent alternative music community in Ireland.
The album is released on double vinyl and digital, and features 21 tracks from the likes of pôt-pot, Landless, I Dreamed I Dream, Crying Loser, The Deadlians, Robbie Stickland, Róis, Rùn, Stratford Rise, Muckno and more, and serves as a DIY surveying of a lot that’s happening around the country in independent band and artist circles.
Daniel Avery – Tremor
Daniel Avery’s sixth album moves away from the heavy electronic compositions he’s known for to weight of a different kind – with guitar noise and distortion central to these songs borne of collaborations with various singers – Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Julie Dawson of NewDad, Cecile Believe, Art School Girlfriend and more.
Tremor is a floor-shaking collection of music bridging techno, electro, breaks and noise with a serene widescreen atmosphere of shoegaze and heavy rock music. It was mixed by Alan Moulder who did wonders with Nine Inch Nails.
Since the earliest recordings, Tremor felt like a studio in the sky, a space in time through which we could all pass as artists. It’s the welcoming spirit of acid house with the doors flung open wider to allow in every influence from my musical life: the warmth of distortion, the stillness inside intensity, the transcendental beauty of noise… They have always been there in my music but now it feels like those ideas are being transmitted in Technicolor. This is a record for the post-rave comedown kids, the guitar heads and anyone else who wants to come along for the ride.
Avery plays Dublin on November 28th.
bog band – Mocashno Days
London-based Irish duo of childhood friends Stephen Sorensen and Isaac Clarke aka Bog Band trade in sophisticated pop music drawn from the ’80s and recent past and their second album with soft rock soul and pop music a la The Style Council, Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile.
I previously featured ‘Midnight Chancers’, and ‘Apryl Fools’ which recalls Steely Dan and yacht rock with its breezy melodies and sounds, and the album is full of such breezy sophisto-pop music.
Snocaps – Snocaps
Country indie rock twin sisters Katie (Waxahatchee) and Allison Crutchfield (Swearin) have made an album together
With a long history of playing together since their teens, the twins urge to create together once more became a reality earlier this year, , backed by pals MJ Lenderman and producer Brad Cook.
It was surprised released on ANTI- last month, and if you have any familiarity with any of these people’s music, you can already guess what it sounds (complimentary). Snocaps is a pleasing American melodic indie rock record – that arrived the same week I was revisited a key ’90s American rock album Last Splash from two other twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal – as The Breeders.
Other Albums I’m enjoying this past month
Including older releases.
- DJ Shadow – In Tune And On Time
- Beach House – Teen Dream
- Outkast – Stankonia
- Yasmine Hamdan – I remember I forget بنسى وبتذكر
- The Breeders – Last Splash
- Ninajirachi – I Love My Computer
- Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Keyboard Fantasies
- El Michels Affair – 24 Hr Sports
- Alex Gough – Painful
- D’Angelo – Brown Sugar / Voodoo
- Nick Drake – Pink Moon
- Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas
What albums are you enjoying? Join our Discord community with a Patreon membership and discuss albums with us.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
