Best New Albums this week: Morgana, Cameron Winter, The Wran, Meryl Streek, KiiKO, Trick Mist, Dawn Richard + more

Morgana takes my album of the week with Morgana MacIntyre of Saint Sister stepping out solo on a busy Friday on a debut album. Cameron Winter’s live album is here, Remi Wolf, Troye Sivan, Pet Shop Boys, Teenage Fanclub and The Tallest Man On Earth all deliver, there is leftfield electronics from Geologist, HAAi and Fatima Al Qadiri, and returns from Dawn Richard and Rochelle Jordan. On the home front, Meryl Streek delivers a guest-stacked third album, The Wran bring brooding banjos and trad to the fore from their Waterford birthplace, KiiKO crosses the playful city pop electronic streams, and Trick Mist’s

Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.

Album of the week

Morgana – The Whole Thing Was Very Emotional

Morgana MacIntyre, one half of Saint Sister, steps out solo with her debut album after a series of world-building singles including album singles  ‘I’ll Cry When I’m Dead’, ‘I’m Not Going Anywhere’, and ‘Fix Your Heart For Free’. Freed from the duo’s harp-led atmospherics, Morgana explores a more direct and personal mode, the songwriting candid and searching and the arrangements built to give her remarkable voice room to carry the weight – and she showcases its range from near-operatic to pop artist and everything in-between.

Having established a mantra of “prepared to party, ready to cry”, that doesn’t mean the music is all intimate and reverent, the DNA of a pure fun synth pop record is obvious throughout what is is an emotionally generous collection of songs produced with Matt Glasbey, unafraid of its own vulnerability (hey, it’s called The Whole Thing Was Very Emotional after all).

’80s electronic-flecked pop records are an influence, and who better than Kate Bush and Abba to be those North Stars for The Whole Thing Was Very Emotional cycles from a lyrical pre-occupation with other people “wanting their attention, approval, affection, or simply wanting to be close to them,” as Morgana puts it, to darker themes of self-reflection and reflective crushing points, usually with with high-drama and warm high-wire arrangements.

Throughout there are moments of deep well musical beauty.

The first half features the operatic opener ‘Make It Hot Make It Cool’ written with Daithi O’Dronaí, is centred on teenage romance, the assertive pop highlight ‘I’m Not Going Anywhere’, ‘Sidekick’ written with Rocky O’Reilly is a grand ode to close friends (“when I’m coming up too hard you play Kylie ‘Slow’ / and when I’m dying on my feet you are in the front row:”), while ‘Chancer’ written with her Saint Sister Gemma Doherty is a gorgeous tea-spilling cutting song about someone you are no longer friends with (“i used to love you / you’re a fucking chancer”) with a vocal outro heavily inspired by a Hungarian choir.

On Side B, the mending begins with Morgana channelling The Roches and Mary O’Hara on the propulsive gallop of ‘Fix Your Heart For Free’., You Are Never Gone From Me’ a baroque alt-pop song written for her long-time manager Conor Cusack, currently recovering from a big cancer operation (“that’s right / that’s my guy / so when the nurse says ‘only family’, i’ll pretend that I’m your wife.”).

 ‘I’ll Cry When I’m Dead’ remains Morgana’s single best song to date, a bright and gilded song of euphoric intent about keeping the fire burning, through partying, codependency and advice sought.

The record ends on the elegaic ‘Win Once’ , a song of acceptance written with close pal Paddy Ormond, which Morgana says she imagines “singing it on the floor of a caravan kitchenette, utterly defeated, wishing only for one win, feeling like a total loser.”

The Whole Thing Was Very Emotional leaves the impression of the artist, the person, disentangling toxic relationships, unspooling complexities and finding solace and meaning in others, as well as herself. Emotional it may be, but I wouldn’t have it any other way if it means these heart on sleeve emotions get to the heart of what it means to be alive and move through the world.

Buy the album on vinyl.

Instore performances (stripped back)

• Fri 9 Oct – Zhivago, Galway – 5pm
• Sat 10 Oct – Music Zone, Cork – 1pm
• Sat 10 Oct – Steamboat, Limerick – 5pm
• Sun 11 Oct – Brindle, Dublin – 2pm (album release party, sold out)
• Thu 15 Oct – Spindizzy Records, Dublin – 6pm
• Sun 18 Oct – Bending Sound, Bangor – 1pm
• Thu 29 Oct – Rough Trade Denmark Street, London – 7.15pm

Headline tour (support: Rosie Carney)

• Wed 16 Dec – Dolan’s Kasbah, Limerick
• Thu 17 Dec – Róisín Dubh, Galway
• Fri 18 Dec – Savoy, Cork
• Sun 20 Dec – Whelan’s, Dublin (sold out)
• Tue 9 Feb 2027 – McChuills, Glasgow
• Wed 10 Feb 2027 – YES Basement, Manchester
• Thu 11 Feb 2027 – The Lower Third, London

Recommended albums

Cameron Winter – Live at Carnegie Hall

The Geese frontman’s solo debut Heavy Metal (2024). Live at Carnegie Hall is his first live album, a much-anticipated document of his December 2025 performance, where he became one of the youngest solo artists to headline the venue’s main auditorium. Alone and arched over the piano with his back to a sold-out room, he reshaped the Heavy Metal songs and aired three previously unreleased compositions, a glimpse into his vault. There is an undeniable sense of occasion to it, the sound of a once-in-a-generation songwriter commanding one of American music’s most hallowed stages.

Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie filmed the show which is being shown in cinemas, but in the US only it seems apart from the odd date.

The Wran – Stone Man

From the Comeragh Mountains in Waterford comes The Wran, whose debut Stone Man fuses trad and folk with a hi-octane banjo bent. The Waterford four-piece are the Dunford brothers, Tommy, Danny, Seán and Stephen who take traditional Irish folk songs and imbues them with a brooding Lankum-adjacent drone trad, while drawing on retro rich harmonies and acoustic band numbers that often jump into full dramatic pelt towards the second half of the song, very often with banjo and on ‘Some Say The Devil Is Dead’, the use of a jaw harp.

Two original compositions ‘Dunford’s March’ and ‘Fear Dearg’ sit alongside their takes on the traditional songs displaying the band’s natural penchant for tension-filled instrumentation, and the album ends in a vocal song local to Waterford – ‘All Kilbrien Are On a Spree’.

LIVE DATES
Tickets

9th October – Dublin, The Workman’s Club SOLD OUT
10th October – Limerick, Dolan’s SOLD OUT
11th October – Galway, Róisín Dubh
13th October – Dublin, The Workman’s Club SOLD OUT
15th October – Cork, Cyprus Avenue
16th October – Co. Kilkenny, Cleeres Bar and Theatre SOLD OUT
17th October – Belfast, Ulster Sports Club SOLD OUT
6th November – Glasgow, Stereo
7th November – Manchester, The Deaf Institute SOLD OUT
8th November – Leeds, The Attic SOLD OUT
9th November – London, Rough Trade East (In-store)
10th November – Nottingham, The Bodega
11th November – Birmingham, Hare and Hounds SOLD OUT
12th November – London, The Lower Third SOLD OUT
13th November – Bristol, Thekla
5th December – Waterford, Bank Lane (supporting Madra Salach)
6th December – Limerick, Dolan’s Warehouse (supporting Madra Salach)
9th December – Dublin, 3Arena (supporting The Pogues)
10th December – Belfast, Telegraph Building (supporting The Pogues)
12th December – Killarney, Gleneagle Arena (supporting The Pogues)

Meryl Streek – Stories They Don’t Teach You At School

The Dublin punk and spoken-word artist delivers his guest-stacked third album, a furious, politically charged record that pulls no punches. Streek has made his name on a confrontational blend of electronic noise, hardcore energy and righteous anger directed at the Irish state, the church and the forces that grind people down with a strong sense of social justice. Stories They Don’t Teach You At School widens the circle, bringing in Steve Ignorant of Crass, Pete Holidai, Phill Jupitus, Lags Barnard, Vinny McCreith (The Vinny Club / Adebisi Shank) and  Meditations for The Anxious Mind’s Frankie McNamara.

Stories They Don’t Teach You At School hits on a fruitful amalgamation of punk-rock instrumentation and evocative electronic production (that recalls For Those I Love at times), and relies more on the courage of lyrical convictions this time out rather than screaming in anger to get the point across. Still, the record is loud, unflinching (there’s a song here about the murder of Kelly Lynch) and completely uninterested in comfort, which is the point of a record like this, as it addresses homelessness, government failing the working class, cost of living, depression and addiction. Meryl Streek will continue to kick against the pricks.

UK LIVE DATES

• Thu 8 Oct – 100 Club, London (album launch show)
• Fri 9 Oct – Venus Vinyl, Norwich
• Sat 10 Oct – Just Dropped In, Coventry
• Sun 11 Oct – Crash, Leeds
• Mon 12 Oct – Truck, Oxford
• Tue 13 Oct – Pie & Vinyl, Southsea
• Wed 14 Oct – Banquet @ The Fighting Cocks, Kingston
• Thu 15 Oct – Resident, Brighton

KiiKO – KiiKO Forever

A new Tokyo-Dublin electronic pop debut album from Emmy Shigeta and John McDowell, with drummer Dave Rogers. KiiKO Forever brings together the two cities’ sensibilities, pairing bright, synth-led Japanese city pop with a crescendo drum break pulse. There is a playful, maximalist streak running through the record, luminescent melodies stacked high over propulsive rhythms, reminscent of Lali Puna, Cornelius and Cibo Matto. It is an assured debut statement , full of identity and a unique addition to the Irish music landscape.

Trick Mist – A Shimmering

Trick Mist is the Cork multi-instrumentalist Gavin Murray, who channels Irish traditional music through an abstract prism, shaped by sean nós singing, experimental sound processing, absurdist lyrics and the writings of the Irish mystic John Moriarty. His third album and Moot Tapes debut, A Shimmering, grew from daily home-studio sessions designed to mine the unconscious: he recorded an idea a day, labelling each one from 1 to 30 and refusing to force them into songs, so he could later judge coldly which fragments belonged together. Out of that came a contemplative, longing-steeped soundscape of detuned tin whistles, aching flutes, primal bodhrán, reverb-dripping banjo and sean nós voice, with Dan Walsh of Fixity and Niamh Dalton of Ana Palindrome guesting. Built on the Irish mythological idea of liminal space, it subverts trad’s bond with the past to tell cautionary tales about the future. One of the most inventive and intriguing releases of the week.

Remi Wolf – Mud

The Los Angeles singer’s third album is her most assured yet, loosening the hyperactive pop of Juno and Big Ideas into something warmer and more lived-in without losing the elasticity that made her name. Written in the wake of heavy touring and a period of recalibration, Mud leans into funk, soul and loose-limbed groove, her voice capable of switching from a croak to a belt in a single bar. The songwriting is sharper and more candid than before, trading some of the maximalist clutter for space and feel.

Clare Sands – They Tried to Bury Us

The Cork fiddle player and bilingual singer, a sixth-generation musician now based in Belfast, makes music where folklore, language and activism meet melody. They Tried to Bury Us was written across Ulster with a cast of musicians from the northern counties and produced by Seán Óg Graham (Beoga, Karan Casey), and it gives voice to the silenced: the endangered curlew, Lí Ban of Lough Neagh, lost words of the Irish language, the Rostrevor oak, those seeking refuge on Irish shores and the Palestinian poets whose defiance runs through it. The title track opens the record over haunting uilleann pipes, Sands echoing the poet Refaat Alareer, “If I must die, you must live to tell my tale,” a line that spoke to Ireland’s solidarity movement. Raw, warrior-spirited and rooted in the earth, it insists that love and hope will never be buried.

Basht. – Poor Advice

The Dublin band’s debut is a concept album. Across 10 tracks Poor Advice traces the old dance between church and state in Ireland, a generation shaped by guilt, silence and obedience, from the Catholic grip on private life and the shame heaped on unplanned pregnancy to the present day, where vocalist and guitarist Jack Leavey hears moral authority outsourced to boardrooms and barracks and the military-industrial complex ticking like a grim metronome. The title is the counsel handed down from above: as Leavey puts it, “keep your head down, say your prayers, trust the deal.” Musically it is taut, propulsive guitar rock, Leavey joined by Lughaidh Armstrong-Mayock on lead guitar, Ryan McClelland on drums and Louis Christle on bass.

Marina Herlop – Dja Dja

The Catalan composer, vocalist and pianist makes some of the most singular avant-garde music in Europe, and Dja Dja, self-released, is her most ambitious statement yet. Classically trained, Herlop built it over three years as a hard-won, cathartic work driven by reflection, creative struggle and resilience, framed by what she calls a creative rage that reaches for self-affirmation rather than conquest. She conceived it as a single unbroken body of work, each piece keeping its own internal logic while the whole coheres, loosely mapped onto the archetypal Hero’s Journey, a myth she reshapes to hand agency to the listener. The singles ‘Jaque’, ‘Vas Volant’ and the proggy, euphoric ‘Bliss’ give a sense of its range, bursting to life on brass fanfares, synth filigree and her brilliantly distinct voice.

Dawn Richard – Creole Culture

The New Orleans artist returns to Merge and to the brass-soaked world of her King Creole persona, rebuilding her home city in her own image. Creole Culture completes a triptych begun with New Breed (2019), told through her father’s eyes, and Second Line (2021), told through her mother’s, before finally telling the story in her own voice, as a Black and Native American woman who has spent a lifetime in music. It is a softer, more expansive take on that swagger, arriving after two avant-garde R&B albums with composer Spencer Zahn, the last of which processed the grief around her father Frank Richard’s illness and the killing of her cousin Cisco. Here New Orleans becomes a utopian soundscape of R&B, soul, hip-hop, pop and jazz: Richard reworks her father’s band Chocolate Milk and their city-defining anthem ‘groove city’ into cosmic, breakbeat R&B for its 50th anniversary, and enlists Big Freedia among others for the ride. From the opening single ‘enough’ to the Afrocaribbean futurism of ‘fiesta’, it is the sound of an artist building the future she wants one record at a time. “King Creole can’t build a world from scratch without help,” as she puts it.

Pet Shop Boys – A Man From the Future

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe return not with a pop album but with an audio biography. A Man From the Future tells the story of the computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing, written by the pair with his biographer Professor Andrew Hodges. It began life at the BBC Proms in July 2014, performed at the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Singers and narration by the actor Juliet Stevenson, and has now been revised and rearranged by Pet Shop Boys and Sven Helbig. Recorded over the past year in the UK and Germany, it features the Manchester Camerata Octet, the Manchester Grammar School Choir and, once again, Stevenson’s narration, with string and vocal arrangements by Helbig. A singular, ambitious piece of work from a duo who have never stopped treating pop as a vehicle for big ideas.

Geologist and Kyle Simon – The Sirens

Brian Weitz, best known as Geologist of Animal Collective, teams with the artist, printmaker and Farrington Observatory founder Kyle Simon for The Sirens, a piece that turns starlight into sound. Simon spent years fitting homemade telescopes with sensors to make the night sky audible, and here the captured light of a full moon modulates Weitz’s modular synthesizer in real time, Simon steering the telescope like a theremin player while Weitz bends and amplifies the signal. Recorded live under the Hunter’s Moon at the Farrington Observatory outside Joshua Tree in October 2024, it unfolds in two parts as a drifting, luminous conversation between the two artists and the starlight completing its journey across the galaxy. A record that belongs as much to astronomy and myth as to music, driven by curiosity and wonder.

HAAi – DIGITiSE

The London-based, Australian-born producer, songwriter and DJ follows her 2025 album HUMANiSE with a record that, as she puts it, holds its predecessor’s hand and walks it to the club. DIGITiSE is a dancefloor record, 10 tracks that sprawl through several lanes at once, shaped by her all-night DJ sets. It keeps probing what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world, the relentless pace of AI and technology and the divisions it creates, before landing on an antidote: community, the unity and belonging of a room full of people. New collaborators Echonomist, Skybreak and Cantoalegre, a children’s choir from Medellín, join returning voices Pat Alvarez, ILA, James Messiah and Kaiden Ford.

Fatima Al Qadiri – 3TWI EP

The Kuwaiti-Senegalese composer returns to Hyperdub with four regional club tracks built around a grim, funny central figure. 3TWI (عتوي) is Kuwaiti femme slang for a dirty old man, literally a male alley cat, and the EP inhabits the gaze of that sleazy, pitiful character. It doubles as a homage and love letter to West Asian folk dance music, celebrating the region’s ethnic diversity and its traditions shared across borders through a coy queer lens. Al Qadiri works with longtime friends and vocal collaborators Bobo Secret, Lama3an and Gumar, the lyrics moving between suggestive spoken word and yearning, largely improvised anthems, all queer in intent.

Jess Williamson – A Mile South Of Heaven

The Texan songwriter made A Mile South Of Heaven with producer Shooter Jennings at the famed Sunset Sound in Hollywood, and it is her most country-forward record yet, rich with pedal steel, fiddle and banjo while keeping the mysticism and indie sensibility that have set her apart. Written between Los Angeles and Marfa, where she splits her time, its 12 songs sit in the push and pull between two worlds, Hollywood ambition on one side and the quiet of Far West Texas on the other, turning over success, home, grief, identity and the freedom of letting go of other people’s expectations and your own. The title is its thesis: we are always a mile short of the impossible goals we set, and, as Williamson puts it, “maybe that’s ok, because a mile is pretty close.” Following Time Ain’t Accidental, Sorceress and her Plains album I Walked With You a Ways with Katie Crutchfield, it is her most personal and fully realised work, a record that rejects the myth of arrival for a life lived in motion.

Sans Chateaux – A Meteoric Fall to Earth

Sans Chateaux is the solo project of the Cork songwriter Austin Moore. A Meteoric Fall to Earth is a 10-track record written and performed entirely by the artist, it was produced by Kevin J Power at Inner Chapter Music, mastered by Fergal Davis and wrapped in cover art by Marina Casal. Musically, it draws on melodic and bright textured folk and chamber pop songwriting, anchored by Moore’s soft-edged vocals.

Teenage Fanclub – Do Not Dare to Dream

The Scottish institution continue their late-career purple patch with another set of the harmony-rich, melancholy-tinged guitar pop they have perfected over 30-plus years. Now a quartet, Teenage Fanclub have aged into their sound with grace, the songwriting reflective and unhurried, the melodies as warm as ever.

Tobe Nwigwe – THE BRIDGE

The Nigerian-American rapper from Houston has become one of the most singular voices in contemporary hip-hop, his tightly choreographed videos and insistent, gospel-inflected flow built on faith, family and heritage. THE BRIDGE leans into an expansive, cross-continental sound that bridges his Naija roots and his Houston upbringing. Singles ‘All or Nothing’ with Labrinth and ‘Perfection’ featuring Flavour and C.S. Armstrong show the scale of his ambition. A soulful record from an artist entirely on his own path.

The Tallest Man On Earth – Just Beyond Endless Mountain

Kristian Matsson returns with his latest as The Tallest Man On Earth, 11 tracks out via ANTI-. The Swedish songwriter has spent more than 15 years crafting intricate, finger-picked folk that wears its Dylan influence openly while remaining entirely his own, and this record finds him in characteristically expressive form. Led by the single ‘Deliver Me From Trying’, it balances his restless guitar work with a lightness of touch that has grown with each release. A reliably rewarding listen from one of modern folk’s most singular voices.

Jamie T – Ghosts (100 Days of Morning)

The Wimbledon songwriter returns with his sixth album, featuring production from Damon Albarn. Jamie T built his name on a scrappy, literate fusion of punk, hip-hop and acoustic storytelling, a distinctly south London voice that caught a particular strand of British youth. Ghosts (100 Days of Morning), led by the single ‘3310’, finds him reflective and road-worn, the Albarn collaboration adding new texture to his restless songwriting. A welcome return from a cult British talent.

Death Valley Girls – Welcome To Earth

The Los Angeles psych-rock band made Welcome To Earth in the ashes of California’s Eaton Fire, after it destroyed singer Bonnie Bloomgarden’s Altadena home and, soon after, took her dog Tommy. Out via Suicide Squeeze, it turns catastrophe outward into a record about connection, the invisible threads linking people, animals, memories and landscapes Bloomgarden was carried through the grief by the band around her, drummer Bailey Chapman, guitarist Laena Myers, bassist Alana Amram, saxophonist Sarah Safaie and keyboardist Gregg Foreman, who died not long after the sessions, making this the final Death Valley Girls recording to feature him.

For all its weight it stays joyful and communal with girl-group harmonies, hazy psychedelia and sing-along choruses run throughout, swelled by 23 guest singers including a children’s chorus. The fire, Bloomgarden says, taught her that “even when I have nothing, I have all I need,” and the album carries that hard-won openness, looking directly at loss and emerging more alive to wonder.

Other Mother – Can’t Help But Feel Dramatic EP

The Cork five-piece call their sound bubblegrunge, a mix of grunge, post-punk and electronics powered by what they term unapologetic feminine rage. Their debut EP Can’t Help But Feel Dramatic, recorded, mixed and mastered by Wavefield Recordings in West Cork, bears that out across five tracks, moving from the spoken-word pop-punk of opener ‘not sorry’ through the post-punk grit of ‘anymore’ and the atmospheric alt-rock of ‘fish to fry’ to the shape-shifting ‘worm song’. Fronted by Willow Esteve with Fionn Cogan, Bláthnaid Marsh, Cathal O’Sullivan and Conor O’Regan, the band are a growing presence on the Cork circuit.

Also out today

• Andy Bell – Primitives
• Bodega – All Inside Aquarium
• Dylan Flynn and the Dead Poets – Raging Of The Night EP
• Dylan John Thomas – Nothing Here Worth Taking
• HUVET – LP1
• Rochelle Jordan – Disc 3
• Troye Sivan – She’s The Best