Best of 2025 | Albums | Guestlists | Irish Albums | Irish songs |
Conor Cusack is a music manager (Saint Sister, Morgana), founder of Merchy Christmas and plays in a new indie band called DIVIL. Over to the man himself…
Merchy Christmas 2025 was its 6th year. It is a testament to the quality and calibre of Irish music right now that there are well over 80 acts taking part, all of whom I truly believe in and think are doing something important. While I have made my 10 selections from artists selling this year, I could have easily picked 100 songs from the artists across the weekend as the collective output has been so strong this year.
Anyway, enough from me and onto the selections (in no particular order).
1.Kiiko – July
Emmy Shigeta is an amazing selector and much loved for her sets in the audiophile bars of Dublin and beyond. I recently ran into her bandmate John, and he was telling me they had started a band together. When I heard Konrad Timon ex Other Creatures was on the tools I was even more psyched to hear it!
July is such a great track and a really exciting debut from the project. The production is really detailed and clean, I love how the vocals sound and the overall optimistic and hopeful sentiment of the song. Definitely one to watch out for in the new year.
2.
MayKay – Dating Shit
To my ears, May Kay’s Dating Shit is an absolute smash hit. It reminds me in the best possible way of music that I would have listened to and religiously watched the music videos of on MTV in the early noughties. I would love to know who the reference points were in the studio for her debut album, because I hear Madonna, Beck & dare I even go there, Alanis Morissette. Just massive vocals and hooks and so much attitude and confidence. This song is a feel-good anthem with a killer bass groove courtesy of Ian McFarlane and the unmistakable golden knob twiddling of Druid of Delgany, Co. Wicklow, Rian Trench. Do yourself a favour and listen to the album.
3.
Curtisy – Sorry I’m Me
Fans of Nialler9 will be no stranger to Curtisy. His debut album was one of the best records of 2024 and rightly was nominated for a Choice Music Prize this year. I first came across Gav at Merchy Christmas two years ago. He joined Nealo on stage for a song, and I was instantly bowled over by his stage presence and charisma. The track they were doing together had started and I think Gav had been in the jacks or forgot he was meant to be on stage, so he had to absolutely leg it on stage wearing this huge puffy jacket and hat. He must have been absolutely sweating, but you would never have known by how cool and collected he was while he did his verse. I just thought he was hilarious and became a big fan in that moment.
I spent a lot of time with his debut album on my honeymoon last year. It was a pretty funny album to have on repeat solidly for two weeks in Sicily with your new missus, but I was absolutely mad about it. So while this pick is technically cheating, as the deluxe version of the album came out on the 25th of October 2024, I only came across it at the start of this year.
This song hit me like a ton of bricks when I first heard it, it was snuck on the end of this album I already knew so well. It’s so honest and raw with a real melancholic feel and some really killer one liners: “It can’t get worse for me down here but it can get worse for you.” It might have gone under the radar for fans as it wasn’t on the first version of the album so I wanted to give it a shout here. The Beauty and The Beast record he released this year is also deadly.
4.
Kean Kavanagh – The Whistle
I love Kean Kavanagh.
The man can do no wrong in my eyes. I met him years ago in Texas coincidentally enough, and I just thought he was the nicest dude. He has been consistently releasing great music since his first track Coca Cola Sky in 2018. I loved Dog Person when that came out and was really excited to hear what his next album would sound like. I saw him at IMW a couple of years back, and he played a lot of the new material. I was surprised as it was really guitar-forward and quite full-band sounding and I was interested to hear how this would play out on his next album as it was quite a departure from the earlier stuff.
The Whistle was the first single off the record and it broke my heart when I first heard it. What a chorus! It sounds absolutely timeless to my ears. I had it on repeat for days. The production is so deep and layered, the more time you spend with it, the more little nuggets you discover. Essential listening for the heartbroken!
5.
Paddy Hanna – Harry Dean
Over the summer, I was on a five-hour bus to Donegal and I listened to every single Paddy Hanna record in chronological order. The man is just so talented. I was lucky enough to work with him on some of his earlier material, releasing two singles on the retired Trout Records imprint. His catalogue is so rich and varied, his vocal delivery is always unstoppable, and his longstanding collaborative partnership with Daniel Fox has resulted in a truly diverse and magnetic body of work.
So I was very excited to dive into Oylegate, his latest offering. I had read an interview with him and journalist Zara Hedderman on her brilliant Substack mailing list The Bad Arts. One thing you can say about Paddy is that he is not afraid to be brutally honest. In this excellent interview, he talked very candidly about his struggles with his mental health and the difficult circumstances from which this album was born. In a music industry where everyone is constantly projecting success and trying to give off the impression of momentum, I found it so refreshing for an artist to just be totally vulnerable and talk about their genuine reality of where his career was at when making this album. To my mind, the man has nothing to prove to anyone as the quality of his work speaks for itself. This record sounds to me like Berlin-era Bowie: bleak, cold and uncompromising.
I was going to pick “No Sleep For Life” as my favourite as it no doubt foreshadows my future life as my first child is born any minute now! But I do think “Harry Dean” is the real knockout of this record. Don’t sleep on Paddy Hanna.
6.
The Null Club – Slip Angle
My adversarial relationship with Gilla Band guitarist Al Duggan has been long documented in the music press. However, you have to give it to the chap, he knows how to make an absolute club banger.
This tune does not let up from start to finish. Pounding kick drum, glitchy vocal samples with a killer stream of consciousness spoken word part en Français from Valentine Caulfield. Not to forget the trademark Duggan discordant sustained pedal note; the tension never lets up once over the entire song.
It brought me back to c. 2013 when I was visiting Al in Prague where he lived for a year while he was on his Erasmus. At the time, I thought all dance music was terrible and simply couldn’t fathom why you would want to go out and listen to it all night. Al took me to this (what was in retrospect amazing) club on a boat where we listened to techno for hours (much to my disappointment). It wasn’t until much later, when I moved to Berlin and really fell in love with dance music, did I realise what I was missing.
While my Berlin raving days may be well and truly behind me, I do hope that there is a reality in some parallel universe somewhere where I get to dance to this track in the main room of Berghain on some Sunday morning. The thing absolutely slaps.
7.
Child of Prague – Skin
Child of Prague came to my attention via a recent FMC newsletter announcing the line-up for Eurosonic in January. I was listening through to the various artists chosen to showcase and stuck on Child of Prague. Their bio describes their sound as an Irish take on midwest emo. This really didn’t sound like my cup of tea. But I stuck it on regardless and my goodness was I glad I did.
I instantly fell in love with the band and immediately tried to book them to play Merchy Christmas this year. Their latest EP Clothed in Sun is excellent.
This song “Skin” is just such a beautiful track. I love the vocals so much, so much resonance and emotion in the delivery. Throw in some Lonesome Crowded West-era Modest Mouse guitar and it’s a total winner. I really look forward to seeing how things progress for this band.
8.
Morgana – I’m Not Going Anywhere
I have had the pleasure of working with Morgan MacIntyre in one way or another for over ten years. I think this track is up there as one of the best things she’s ever done and I am not alone. For anyone who has been to a Morgana show over the past two years knows, the reaction this gets live really shows that the general public agrees.
It is just a stone-cold banger. I love everything about it, the arpeggiated synth, the driving drums and huge chorus vocal just do it for me every time. We sat on this song for quite a while before it came out. The amazing music video was shot over a year before the song was released. During this period, I just kept returning to this song again and again. I knew it was truly something special.
I do believe that things happen at the time they are supposed to. It was a personal career highlight helping this song find its way into the world in October. I have such respect and admiration for Morgana as an artist and I am confident over the coming years the world will fall in love with her music.
9.
Rory Sweeney – Ruh Roh
For about six months, any time I went to a meeting with someone from the music industry, the name Rory Sweeney would come up. The producer extraordinaire who can do everything from blistering hip hop production to dancefloor killers. Anyone cool I met in their early 20s seemed to be absolutely raving about him – which is always a good sign.
Then I heard the Curtisy record and that cemented to me that this guy really knows his shit. Wok to Blackrock is one of the standouts on the record – “Got this beat from Rory Sweeney, think it might fit like a glove.”
Anyway, this Old Earth record that just came out is the first music from his solo project that I have spent lots of time with and it’s absolutely excellent. I really recommend checking it out.
It’s really not what I thought it would be. It’s real musical journey stuff, some really deep and trippy introspective moments. Then some absolute pounding breakbeats As Gaeilge. Then medieval hip hop. It sort of picks up where Mel Keane left off with his brilliant Frog Of Earth record but takes it in a mad new direction. A real standout of the year for me. Hard to pick a favourite song but think it has to be “Ruh Roh.”
10.
DIVIL – Thanks A Million
OK please forgive me in advance for an absolutely shameless bit of self-promotion. The lads will be absolutely mortified I am doing this but look, all publicity is good publicity.
Last year, I formed a band with two very old and dear friends Danny McMahon and Jocelyn Vance. We started the band as a way for us to process the grief & trauma and love we were collectively going through. In the 6 months before the band started, one of us became a father, one of us lost a father and another was diagnosed and treated for cancer. Heavy shit.
The band became a vital outlet for each of us and the evenings we spent together in the studio were a way for us to work through our experience. The first song we wrote was called “Thanks A Million” and I am very proud of it. For personal reasons, this song is one of my top songs of the year for what it represents to me and how it helped me during this time.
The song will be out in the new year and we will be playing lots more shows. Consider yourself alerted!
Best of 2025 | Albums | Guestlists | Irish Albums | Irish songs |
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.
