The best new Irish songs this week feature emerging tracks we’ve selected from artists from the island of Ireland, with more playlist additions below the main list.
Explore the best new Irish songs alongside our curated playlist for the week.
For more extensive Irish and new music coverage, read the Irish section for individual track features.
KhakiKid
Moved On
Dublin 12 alt-pop lodestar Khakikid is just really good at this music and video game.
Following the viral ‘Date Nite’, he has dropped another banger and moved on before his big headline Dublin show at 3Olympia Theatre on November 27th.
HAVVK
Happening Again
Irish alternative rock band HAVVK take things to a dread-filled place with this big sheenful rock number that builds and shifts in a labyrinthine manner, echoing the subject matter of the song.
Vocalist Julie Hawk says, “I really enjoyed leaning into the cyclical pattern of the song and giving it a sense of no way out. Because that’s how it can feel like sometimes, when you notice yourself acting or thinking in a way that you swore you’d never do again”.
“The verses were especially vicious and were really cathartic to write – because in these moments it’s so easy to say cruel things to yourself that you’d never say to anyone else, and to see every little thing as a reminder of how you’ve landed right back where you started”.
Guitarist Matt Harris says, “Julie and I both had different musical ideas that we stuck together for this song. We used the idea of the musical theme that starts the song coming around full circle at the end to try and capture the feeling of dread and realisation of realising you’ve done it again”
‘Happening Again’ is the band’s first song since their 2024 album To Fall Asleep.
Dani Larkin
Morning
Ahead of forthcoming album Next Of Kin, due January 30, 2026, Singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Dani Larkin has been releasing a series of tracks including ‘End Of It All’, a version of traditional Irish folk song ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, and ‘Moving’, which opens the record, a brooding take on Eleanor Farjeon’s 1931 hymn ‘Morning Has Broken’.
“I wanted the record to start with the first breath of darkness into morning light indulging in the concept that morning is indeed broken. The fragmentation of our current existence into something altogether different. The old world into the new.”
Lots of live dates upcoming for Larkin, who won an award at last night’s NI Music Prize.
Smokey
Ronseal
Dublin rapper Smokey continues his ‘Superman’ run with a tune produced by Negro Impacto’s Strangelove, about the messy side of friendships, when things take a turn for the backstabbing section of the relationship.
The tune uses Ronseal’s famous state-it-as-it-is slogan to ask “what if your guarantee came with your friends?”
USNABOY
MAD TOO
London-based Fermanagh-born USNABOY is a self-described Y2K pop artist who dropped a new EP called GUT FEELING, and the wavy sprightly alt-pop of ‘Mad Too’ stood out to me for its earworm hook and production.
Affection to Rent
Cathedral
Bringing a celestial grunge vibe to Irish music is emerging Dublin band Affection To Rent.
‘Cathedral’ is only the band’s second single led by the yearning vocal of Abbey Addenbroke-Sheriff, and the song has a ecclesiastical origin shhe says:
“The song was sparked by hearing a choir sing from a cathedral in Dublin as I passed in the empty early hours one winter night. We wanted to capture a feeling of being lost in something much larger than yourself, with lyrics to describe the human capacity for vast emotions as the echoing scale of a cathedral interior. It holds all I felt at the time: a curiosity about fate, fear, and passion.”
For more extensive Irish and new music coverage, check into the Irish section for individual track features…
For this and more Irish songs, follow the Nialler9 New Irish playlist.
Other Playlist additions this week:
- The Altered Hours – Lay There with You
- Róisín McKeown – Bushwick Fool
- Dani Larkin – End Of It All
- Laura McFadden – Closer
- The Wran – Some Say The Devil Is Dead
- Chósta – Fading City
- IB REBEL; 4103 – Lloyd Charmers
- BLANDAD – Rent Boy
- Aimee Cuffe – September
- Draw a Line – Springer
- Skyless – Gasoline
- Officer John – Onwards
- THE GRЭY COLLECTIVE – Keep The Fire
- MIDNIGHT REQUEST – NATURAL
- Aisling Urwin – Flying Colours
- Zaska; jarjarjr – The Papez
- Walshy – soulless
- Neev – Put A Record On
- Isaac Jones – I Don’t Wanna Run Outta Money Again
- telekura – spirit twin
- Mirrors – Would
- Caolan Ryan – Feel The Same
- SX2; Def Nettle – POWDER! – Radio Edit
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.
