Here’s a rundown of new releases out today, including new albums and EPs on DSPs and physical releases in record shops this week.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2025.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums
FKA Twigs – EUSEXUA Afterglow
A followup record to January’s Eusexua, the third twigs albums which inspired by late nights in the underground techno scene of Prague, while shooting the film The Crow.
EUSEXUA Afterglow expands on the feelings that come after experiencing EUSEXUA, transmuting them into a soundtrack for the hours after the rave and extending that high into the afters. It is the experience of having left the rave but still feeling the pulse of the music and the euphoria of movement still inside you, even though you have physically left that space.
Austra – Chin Up Buttercup
Canadian vocalist and composer Katie Stelmanis’ new album on Domino Records, came after her long-term partner split with her in 2020, and the artist who had been singing operatic electronic arias about personal tragedy for years, suddenly had her heart broken.
Stelmanis and co-producer Kieran Adams took inspiration from the Eurodance sound of Madonna’s landmark 1998 album Ray of Light, produced by William Orbit, and emerged with a mix of hypnotic dance floor anthems and elegant melodies to soothe your broken heart.
Austra to play first Dublin show in nine years next March.
Bicep – CHROMA 000
The Bicep electronic duo of Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar encapsulate their Chroma releases to date on the label with a limited edition vinyl boxset release with all of the singles so far and two extra bonus tracks.
CHROMA has been such a fun series of parties and releases for us, opening up a much broader range of club music to make and play out. It’s also been an honour to collaborate with David Rudnick, someone we’ve admired for years. Watching the whole process—music, design, and visuals—come together and evolve every week with our visuals director Zak Norman has been genuinely refreshing and inspiring.”
Shampain – Millennium Madness
Galway DJ, producer and recent Podcast guest Shampain has been rolling out tracks and collaborations from Millennium Madness over recent months with NewDad’s Julie Dawson, Bethany and Elaine Malone all featuring on this, Shampain’s first full body of work as an 8-track album, following the Catching Up With Myself EP.
The album is set across a year in Galway’s city centre and “explores the sounds and atmospheres of the town. Its structures, nature, surrounding suburbs and villages across the four seasons in the tumultuous seaside town.“
Themes of night and day, good vs evil, technology vs humans and city vs nature are all apparent from track to track. In that vein, the EP is split in two halves; Spring/Summer & Autumn/Winter – loosely depicted by the front and back artworks by Sean Kennedy and Conor Ostheimer.
Minced Oath – Sonar Kella
Dunk Murphy, the Dublin electronic producer sometimes known as Sunken Foal, and here Minced Oath, releases a new album on Countersunk, which originated in an overnight ambient performance on Dublin Digital Radio, presented as Sun Static in 2020, which I will let Dunk explain:
The work began with the conception of a performance system built around sixteen convolution resonators, each fed by dynamically controlled noise sources within the computer. The aim was to create an instrument capable of producing textural, aleatoric swells—free from temporal grids or fixed rhythmic structures—something I could surrender to and inhabit over an extended duration. The original performance lasted around eight hours.
If tuned correctly, the resonators could behave like an ensemble of jagged, crumbling bowed instruments. For the noise sources, I stripped some vintage movies of their dialogue and music, leaving only the residual cackling hiss of magnetic tape and incidental ambient sounds. Each track takes its title from its source movie—the movies being chosen only for their sonic character. Once amplified and routed through the resonator system, these fragments produced brittle, unpredictable timbres and unstable harmonic configurations—an environment that invited plenty of play.
There is a sense throughout of the microscopic blooming into the cyclonic: superfluous artefacts are brought to the foreground, their stochastic energy revealed and buoyed up. Each return to the material yielded subtle differences and unpredictable prods, as though the system itself was musically temperamental. Over time, the pieces have evolved through multiple iterations, incorporating modular synthesis and acoustic instrumentation to brace and embellish them. Sonar Kella forms the first part of a two-album series.
Careerist – Silver Birch Lodge
Belfast alternative rock trio Careerist followup their debut from six years ago with a second album named after a nursing home on the route to their rehersal space. The band – Carl Eccles (vocals, guitars, keys), Nathan Rodgers (bass, vocals), and Conor Ellison (drums, percussion), cite inspirations of Prefab Sprout, Cate Le Bon, Roxy Music and late-era Bryan Ferry, along with their OG influences Deerhunter and Parquet Courts.
The six year gap can be partly explained by COVID naturally, but also Eccles emigrating to the US with his long-term partner at the time, only for the relationship not to last and Eccles returning home with the band becoming a going concern once more. Many of the songs were written in 2019, with more in 2022.
“The guts of the album was written before that breakup,” Eccles explains. “In retrospect, the lyrics explain what I was going through in the perfect past tense. The songs were written as though something was already in the past because, I suppose, I was certain it was going to happen; that relationship ending and things ending in general.”
Careerist’s album launch happens November 21st in Ulster Sports Club.
Huartan – Huartan
Huartan emerge from the Gaeltacht quarter of West Belfast and bring an Irish trad sensibility to songs that move with electronic-driven productions – the band’s evocative sound is presented live with hooded and masked performances, they present modern reinterpretations of “at-risk” Irish language songs.
The album features synth, accordion, flute, whistle, fiddle and beats and was made with Seán Óg Graham of Beoga Additional instrumentation provided by Clare Sands on strings and Laura McFadden on cello.
“Rather than seeing them as relics of the past, we believe our culture and traditions are safest when they are allowed to transform and take on new meanings”, says singer Catriona Ní Ghribín.
Nightmares On Wax – ECHO45 Sound System
Nightmares On Wax’s George Evelyn’s new album is inspired by Echo45, a battered little £5 speaker his mother bother for him when he was young lad which he credits with changing the course of his life.
The album blends soul, roots, hip-hop, dub, and electronic textures in the NOW style with collaborators Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Greentea Peng, Sadie Walker, Liam Bailey and more.
Dorian Concept – Miniatures
Dorian Concept returns with Miniatures, a collection of his renowned one-take synthesizer recordings that he’s been known for sharing online since the mid-2000s. “This release was right under my nose” he says. Over the past two decades, Dorian Concept has uploaded videos of himself fooling around on various synthesizers and keyboards, long before the rise of short-form content. These signature one- to two-minute performances have sparked countless covers, remixes and reinterpretations by musicians and producers alike. With this project, Dorian Concept aims to celebrate a long-standing bond with his instruments and honour it in the form of a photo album.
Also released this week
- Blondshell – Another Picture
- caroline – caroline 2 (deluxe)
- Christy Moore – A Terrible Beauty – The Expanded Edition
- Colter Wall – Memories and Empties
- Drive-By Truckers – The Definitive Decoration Day
- Ed Harcourt – Orphic
- Eris Drew – DJ-Kicks
- Farao – Magical Thinking
- Jake Xerxes Fussell & James Elkington – Rebuilding
- James Ferraro & Bladee – Sanctuary OST
- Mike Patton & The Avett Brothers – AVTT/PTTN
- Navy Blue – The Sword & The Soaring
- Nicholas Craven & Boldy James – Criminally Attached
- Orville Peck – Appaloosa
Recent posts on New Albums:
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.
