One Leg One Eye, the Lankum-connected project of Ian Lynch and George Brennan, release their second album on AD 93 with Olwen Fouéré channelling the Morrigan. Future Islands gather rarities and new songs into a 4AD compilation. Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien releases his second solo album as EOB. JPEGMAFIA delivers his sixth and it’s the album of the week. Guitar improviser Bill Orcutt teams up with Mabe Fratti. Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang release their first album together on Real World. Dublin four-piece Dose drop their debut EP. Limerick Traveller artist Willzee releases Deep Tinker and The Cranberries’ debut gets a deluxe reissue.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums + EPs
Album of the week:
JPEGMAFIA – Experimental Rap (AWAL)
The sixth studio album from Barrington Hendricks, the rapper, producer and self-described cultural disruptor i his first solo full-length since 2024’s acclaimed I Lay Down My Life for You. Self-produced with lead single ‘Babygirl’ teasing the album’s precise and urgent chaotic sonic sound – like his best work – blown out red-hot productions, noise-shifting, sample-heavy, guitar-clanging, restless rap songs that sound like no other and doesn’t sit still for a bar. On first listen, this sounds like some of JPEGMAFIA’s best work. There’s a lot going on.
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One Leg One Eye – CRONE (AD 93)
The second album from One Leg One Eye, the project of founding Lankum member Ian Lynch and veteran noise musician George Brennan, out today on the consistently excellent AD 93 (home to James K, Moin, Martha Skye Murphy and YHWH Nailgun). It follows their 2022 debut …And Take The Black Worm With Me, a set of ambient drone pieces partly recorded in an abandoned Dublin factory. We flagged the album back in April off the back of the wild opening track ‘Many are my Names Besides’.
Four tracks, conceived as a sonic invocation of the sovereignty goddess who personifies the land and the right to rule it, in her darkest and most terrifying form. The towering presence on the record is Olwen Fouéré (Operating Theatre), the legendary actor, performer, writer and director, whose guttural, elemental vocals run through the album. She recorded her part in a single day, improvising over the already-composed music while channelling the Morrigan, the crow-haunting war goddess of Irish myth, drawing on text Lynch sent her from the Ulster Cycle.
“Listening back, at this time in our world, I can only wonder at how much blood and war the Crone/Crow of sovereignty is preparing to unleash now,” Fouéré says. Much of it was recorded by Lynch and Brennan back in 2021, before One Leg One Eye fully existed as an entity, with Brennan working on CRONE while Lynch built …And Take The Black Worm With Me. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug. The duo are currently touring Canada and the UK with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Future Islands – From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth (4AD)
A career-spanning compilation from the Baltimore synth-pop band, gathering rarities, B-sides and previously hard-to-find tracks alongside new material on 4AD. The collection is anchored by two new singles, ‘Sail’ and ‘Find Love’, the first new Future Islands music since 2023’s People Who Aren’t There Anymore.
For a band who broke through on the strength of Samuel T. Herron’s extraordinary live presence and the slow-burn ubiquity of ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’, a tidy-the-archives release like this is a chance to hear the band’s evolution in the margins. New-wave bones, post-punk pulse and Herring’s unmistakable baritone-to-growl theatrics throughout.
Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho (Transgressive)
The second solo album from the Radiohead guitarist, arriving six years after his 2020 debut Earth. One of several Radiohead solo projects landing this year, and one of the most warmly anticipated given how well Earth balanced O’Brien’s ambient-leaning instincts with proper songcraft.
The reviews so far have been strong. Blue Morpho takes its name from the iridescent butterfly, and by all accounts continues O’Brien’s interest in transformation, texture and the slow build, the qualities he brings to Radiohead pushed to the front of the mix rather than woven into the band’s collective sound.
Alela Diane – Who’s Keeping Time? (Fluff & Gravy / Loose Music)
The seventh album from the Portland singer-songwriter, the follow-up to 2022’s Looking Glass, and a record shaped by loss and a renewed pull toward community. Part of its genesis traces back to the death last year of Portland folk mainstay Michael Hurley, the “godfather of freak folk,” who Diane counted as both influence and friend. Performing at a tribute show in his honour caused her to reassess her relationship with music: “It was an epiphany to realise how much I missed my community. I felt very clear about what I wanted in that moment: I want to be alive. I want to see live music. I want to play it.”
Eleven songs, co-produced with Sam Weber and recorded live over 10 days in August 2025 in the attic of her 1892 Victorian home in Portland, where the songs were written. No click tracks, no tricks, the whole band playing together in one room, with Maggie the cat asleep on the pre-amps. Anna Tivel (vocals and violin), Lucius’ Peter Lalish (guitar), Danny Austin-Manning (drums) and Sebastian Owens (bass) feature, the arrangements pulsing with chamber-folk orchestration. Lead single ‘California’ opens the record. A lyrically deft, impressionistic storyteller in the lineage of Kris Kristofferson.
Mick Flannery – The House Must Win (One Riot Records)
The ninth studio album from the Cork singer-songwriter and his first ever double album, drawn from the stage musical of the same name premiering at the Pavilion Theatre Dun Laoghaire and the Everyman Cork. The conceptual roots go back two decades to Flannery’s 2005 debut Evening Train, which was originally written as a college project at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa in Cork City and grew from a single song into a narrative of love, gambling and betrayal between two brothers in a small Irish town. The House Must Win reimagines the songs from that debut alongside ten new compositions written specifically for the stage production, with American musician and Hadestown music supervisor Liam Robinson handling all the orchestrations. Recorded at Monique Studios in Cork with Flannery’s long-time collaborator Christian Best.
The guest list runs deep. Anaïs Mitchell, the Hadestown writer and Grammy winner, duets on lead single ‘Rising Tide’, a delicate ballad built around a near-drowning memory used as metaphor. Lisa Hannigan takes ‘Grace’s Waltz’. Susan O’Neill features on ‘The Rebel’. Jenn Grant is on ‘Creak in the Door’, the song that started it all in 2005. Portland songwriter Jeffrey Martin is on ‘Talk to Me’. West Cork folk singer Marybeth O’Mahony joins Yvonne Daly on ‘One Chance’. Tabitha Smyth, Brian Flannery, Eamonn Flannery and David Flannery are also throughout.
The stage production stars Tommy Tiernan, Tabitha Smyth, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Niall McNamee, Orlagh de Bhaldraith, Damian Kearney and John McCarthy, directed by Julie Kelleher with Ciarán Bagnall on set and lighting design.
Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang – The Endless Dance (Real World)
The first collaborative album from the Northern Irish composer and producer Hannah Peel and the Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang. The pair met while working on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album NEON, and the record is structured around the 24 solar terms of the traditional Chinese calendar, a journey through the natural year rendered in sound.
Recorded across five days at Real World and produced by Mike Lindsay (LUMP, Tunng), it pairs Peel’s synths, prepared piano and programming with Wang’s traditional and unconventional percussion, taking in rice bowls and a jawbone, with Hyelim Kim guesting on the Korean daegeum flute. A step away from both artists’ classical grounding into something freer and more playful. As Wang puts it, the album is “two women talking in totally different languages that had a wonderful chat.” Nine tracks, with names like ‘Wild Geese Arrive’, ‘Awaken The Insects’ and ‘Thunder Begins To Soften’. A live performance follows at the Barbican, London on October 24th.
Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti – Almost Waking (Unheard of Hope)
A collaboration between the American guitar improviser Bill Orcutt, once of noise-rock pioneers Harry Pussy and now a singular voice in solo electric and acoustic guitar, and Mabe Fratti, the Guatemalan cellist, singer and composer based in Mexico City whose own records have been some of the most quietly thrilling experimental releases of recent years.
The pairing makes immediate sense: both artists work with space, dissonance and the tension between melody and abstraction. Almost Waking lands on Unheard of Hope, the label that has become a reliable home for this kind of border-blurring music.
Aja Monet – The Color of Rain (Drink Sum Wtr)
The new album from the Brooklyn-born surrealist blues poet, the follow-up to 2023’s Grammy-nominated when the poems do what they do. Monet works at the meeting point of spoken word and jazz, her poetry carried on live, improvisatory arrangements rather than beats. The Color of Rain extends that practice: politically charged, deeply musical, rooted in the Black radical tradition and the long lineage of jazz-poetry from The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron onward.
Marisa Anderson – The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music
The new album from the Portland guitarist, one of the foremost voices in American primitive and instrumental guitar today. The title is a sly inversion of Harry Smith’s foundational Anthology of American Folk Music, and signals Anderson’s ongoing project of interrogating the American songbook and the mythology around it through her playing.
Anderson’s work draws on blues, folk, gospel, country and the open-tuned fingerpicking lineage of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, but always bent toward something more questioning and personal. Meditative, politically aware, beautifully played.
Bleachers – everyone for ten minutes (Dirty Hit)
The fifth studio album from Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers, the follow-up to 2024’s self-titled record and their second for Dirty Hit. Antonoff is, of course, one of the most in-demand producers of the era (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, Lorde, St. Vincent, yadda yadda ), but Bleachers remains the place where his own E Street-via-the-suburbs heart beats loudest.
The album was led by the single ‘you and forever’, with ‘dirty wedding dress’ following, the latter nodding back to the title of 2021’s Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night. Maximalist, sax-drenched, emotionally widescreen.
The Cranberries – Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (Deluxe Edition)
A deluxe reissue of the 1993 debut album from the Limerick band, the record that introduced Dolores O’Riordan’s extraordinary voice to the world and gave us ‘Linger’ and ‘Dreams’. The expanded edition gathers demos, B-sides and live material around the original album.
More than 30 years on, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? remains a landmark of Irish music, the sound of a young band from the mid-west arriving fully formed with a jangling, melancholic, instantly recognisable take on indie-pop. A fitting moment to revisit where one of Ireland’s most beloved and most-missed voices began.
fakemink – Terrified
The second studio album from the Essex-born, London-based rapper and producer, the follow-up to his viral 2023 debut London’s Saviour. fakemink has built a singular corner of the UK underground out of 2000s electronics, melancholic bedroom-rap melody and quick, unpredictable flows. Terrified was bridged earlier this year by the January EP The Boy Who Cried Terrified.
The album is conceived as a sonic descent inspired by Dante’s Inferno, starting in hell with low frequencies and ritualistic textures before evolving upward, and it is almost entirely self-produced. “The reason why I’m so proud about this is because I made all of this from scratch,” he told Zane Lowe, “except two songs, two songs have samples.”
Dose – Sycophantic EP (Pizza Pizza Records)
The debut EP from Dublin four-piece Dose, out this week on Pizza Pizza Records features five tracks of sheenful alt-rock – spikey dream pop – addressing “emotional manipulation, narcissism, alienation, and the absurdity of trying to remain emotionally functional in a collapsing world”.
Dose Live Dates:
May 23rd – Sycophantic EP Launch Show, Dublin (TICKETS)
May 28th – Róisín Dubh, Galway
June 6th – Duke of York, Belfast (TICKETS)
June 12th – Beyond The Pale Festival, Wicklow
Willzee – Deep Tinker (Welcome to the New World)
The new album from Willzee (William Casey), the Limerick-based artist of Traveller heritage whose work spans music, poetry, screenwriting and activism. Deep Tinker fuses rap, Irish folk and spoken word into something deeply personal and politically resonant, both a reflection and a declaration of the resilience and reality of the Irish Traveller community. Across 10 tracks it draws on personal experience and collective memory, taking in marginalisation, family, injustice and cultural erasure, but always with a strong sense of forward momentum.
Produced by Enda Gallery, with contributions from Steo Wall, Sharon Ward, Strange Boy and T.O.H, plus fiddle from Aindrias DeStaic and flute and whistle from Katie Theasby. A winner of the Traveller Pride Award, Willzee’s wider work includes the short film Innocent Boy, the album Kuti Gris and the NO SPUDZ podcast.
Molly O’Mahony – Waiting On The World
The new album from the West Cork singer-songwriter and former frontwoman of Mongoose.
Waiting On The World is an album about love and life in a post-covid world. Teetering on the knife-edge between hope and despair, the album’s primary arc documents a relationship that takes place against the backdrop of a profoundly changed and polarised global landscape.
Each song in its own way is an attempt to grapple with the gulf between the lunacy of the wider world, and the microcosm of my experiences; my felt sense of the increasing confusion, distortion and polarisation created by the media and the online realms, juxtaposed with the profound beauty of falling in love, healing old wounds, and feeling fully witnessed for the first time. I hope the album speaks to the utter preciousness of the latter experience, and says something worthwhile about how those whom we love are our only real lifeline in these turbulent times.
We are all in some state of anxiety, waiting on the world to do something, at this strange moment. Is it the beginning of the end? Or will the chips fall, the dust settle, and something green and new emerge? Waiting On The World is about holding fast in that uncertainty while feeling everything, and returning, always, to hope.
O’Mahony takes the record on the road across Ireland through the summer, including a full-band show at Whelan’s Dublin on June 11th and a homecoming at Levis’ Ballydehob on June 13th.
Zeropunkt – Starry Dynamo in the Machinery of Night (Last Of Our Kind)
The 16th album from the Dublin free-improv trio of Fergus Cullen (saxes, keys, guitar, electronics), Jamie Davis (drums, percussion, sax) and Damien Lennon (bass, effects), out this week on CD via Last Of Our Kind. Formed as the quartet ¡NO! back in 2013, they have spent more than a decade as one of the most uncompromising voices on the Irish free-psychedelic scene, collaborating live with underground pioneers including Glenn Branca, Damo Suzuki and Kawabata Makoto along the way.
The new record, its title lifted from Ginsberg’s Howl, melds no wave, free jazz, serialist grooves, industrial noise and electronic processing into the band’s singular brand of brooding, blissed-out improvisation, with Hugh O’Neill adding trumpet and electronics.
S.U.R.E. & Arveene – HOME AGAIN DATA 10
Dublin dance legend Arveene takes a break from his hip-house project Bon Voyage to collaborated with S.U.R.E. for a four-tracker of acid and tech-house rooted productions on the Berlin label Home Again, with the tropical bird sample made famous by 808 State appearing throughout as a marker of lineage.
Also released this week
- 6LACK – Love is The New Gangsta
- Bladee – Sulfur Surfer
- Dua Lipa – Live From Mexico
- Hammock – The Second Coming Was a Moonrise
- Lowertown – Ugly Duckling Union
- Visible Cloaks – Paradessence
