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
A. G. Cook – The Moment
The Score album from the Charli XCX-centred A24 film by Aidan Zamiri – The Moment. Features 10 tracks of instrumental electronic club bashes with occasional ambient passages as on ‘Residue’.
The film The Moment is out today, and features Charli, Rosanna Arquette, Kate Berlant, Kylie Jenner, Rachel Sennott, Alexander Skarsgård and more. It arrives two weeks ahead of Charli XCX’s soundtrack and the release of the Emerald Fennell film Wuthering Heights on February 13th.
Ailbhe Reddy – Kiss Big
Kiss Big is the followup to Irish singer-songwriter Ailbhe Reddy’s previous records Endless Affair (2023) and Personal History (2020).
KISS BIG is an album about the end of a long-term relationship (classic, really) and the disorienting aftermath of losing the person you built a life around. It explores feeling untethered from them, yourself, who you thought you were and the world. As well as how, with time, everything rearranges and restarts. The cyclical nature of love and endings. The way we keep beginning again, regardless of how we say we won’t.
It lives in the messy middle: the disorienting period when the life you built with someone collapses, and you’re left trying to figure out who you are on your own.
Written between Dublin, London, New York and the American Midwest, Kiss Big traces the cycle of love, loss, and renewal. It’s raw and wry: the sound of coming apart and gluing yourself back together.
Ailbhe Reddy’s top songs of 2025
Ailbhe plays Button Factory in May.
Ye Vagabonds – All Tied Together
Irish folk band Ye Vagabonds release their fourth album on Rough Trade’s River Lea label. Brothers Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn are joined on the album by multi-instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily, Alain Mc Fadden, Caimin Gilmore, Kate Ellis, Sam Amidon, Romain Bly and Louise Gaffney.
All Tied Together was recorded with producer Philip Weinrobe (Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker) in a house in Galway, and the accompanying information says “the powerful and cinematic album features deeply evocative original songs infused with memory, tribute, and gratitude.”
Throughout, a strong sense of home prevails, both their own hard-won digs, past and present, and an inner refuge for anyone longing for connection beyond time and geography. “All these songs have addresses,” says co-frontman Diarmuid Mac Gloinn. “They’re about specific locations and specific people.” The brothers cite fiction writers George Saunders and Claire Keegan as particular inspirations on this record.
Irish, UK, European and US tour dates for the coming months here.
Dani Larkin – Next Of Kin
Singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Dani Larkin trailed the release of second album Next Of Kin with songs that included ‘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’.
Next Of Kin was co-produced with Ruth O’Mahony Brady and tracklisted as a trilogy that moves from “darkness and conflict to a coming-of-age in Part I. Part II explores the complex orchestral landscapes of adulthood. The journey concludes with Part III, a poignant homecoming and sense of celebration with the instrumental ‘Love & Liberation’ into the wonder and awe of all that’s to come.”
“Next Of Kin offers a snapshot of what it means to exist in a world that is falling apart, the fragmentation and the pulling of pieces together to move to a space of liberation before death.” Dani states of the record. “It’s intended as a companion through the different stages of life, from birth, to greeting death as an old friend. A pondering on who or what is Next Of Kin.”
Dani Larkin Irish UK tour dates and instores.
Marta del Grandi – Dream Life
Italian singer-songwriter Marta Del Grandi returns with an album that bustles in a field of dreams, a multi-dimensional panoramic snapshot punctuated with serene disillusionment, that transcends musical boundaries as personal hopes and aspirations are cast against the vastness of the stars and beyond.
Beck – Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime
An eight-track release from the LA singer-songwriter and polymath focuses on “a lovingly curated collection of rarities, deep cuts and covers” with covers of Elvis, the Flamingos, Caetano Veloso and John Lennon. The title cover comes from his version he contributed to the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.
It’s on streaming today ahead of a physical release on Feb 13.
PILGRIMS – Wintering
Paul Noonan and Brian Crosby have made a collaborative album – just the two of them. They’ve been childhood friends, started two bands together – Juniper and Bell X1 – and here they are Pilgrims – formed from instrumental pieces by Crosby.
“Since reconnecting on My Bones a Scaffold last year, we’ve been working on a bunch of songs that sprung from new instrumental pieces by Brian, or songs that I had sketches for. Colouring them in together. Coming from a more classical or cinematic well, Brian takes the kinds of harmonic journeys that I just don’t, and the songs are all the richer for it.
We did some shows together last April, and played some of these new things. It was there that Pilgrims was formed, in its purist form just piano and vocal. Not torch songs as such, but somewhat similar in their yearning, theatrical sentimentality. In those small beautiful rooms, it took actually playing the songs for people, feeling that connection and inhabiting the characters for it to feel like it had its own heart and lungs.”
Bitchin Bajas – Isle Peaks
Bitchin Bajas are a Chicago band with feet in the ambient and jazz worlds and this new release on Drag City is 26 minutes of psychedelic playful productions painted with horns, synths, marimba, harp and ambience across two long songs of 16 minutes and 11 minutes in length.
Not on Bandcamp at time of writing.
Geologist – Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?
The Animal Collective member Brian Weitz releases his first solo album.
Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?, the first-ever proper Geologist solo album is Brian’s pursuit of a musical answer to the not-oft-enuf-ast question: what if, back in the 80s, Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST?
By Storm & Injury Reserve – My Ghosts Go Ghost
My Ghosts Go Ghost is the debut studio album by alternative duo By Storm who formed after the death of their friend Stepa J. Groggs in 2020 from their band Injury Reserve.
The album is utterly informed by Groggs’ passing and is a contemplative avant treatise on dealing with this grief and the aftermath, formed from lucid live improvisations around central ideas or thoughts that are sung, mumbled in passing, rapped out of range, or covered in effects. Billy Woods features on Best Interest’. too.
Aidan Duffy – Part II
Solo debut album from a Galway-based Meath artist who makes folk and traditional music and mentions Villagers, Jessica Pratt and David Gray as influences. Aidan plays with The Leon Stax Equation and Lo-Flier.
Across 2024 and 2025, Duffy navigated the end of a long-term relationship, a move west to Galway, and the gradual loss of his father to dementia — experiences that shape the emotional core of the album.
Part II features contributions from brother Ben Duffy (The Leon Stax Equation), Gareth Quinn Redmond (Throwing Shapes) and Paul Spring (Holy Hive).
Launch shows: Primm’s of Kinsale (Feb 22) & Cathedral Church of St Patrick, Trim (Mar 20).
Also released this week
- Don Toliver – OCTANE
- fakemink – The Boy Who Cried Terrified EP
- Hania Rani – Sentimental Value
- James Adrian Brown – Forever Neon Lights
- Labrinth – COSMIC OPERA ACT I
- MOMA Ready – Body 25
- Natural Magic – II (Optimo)
- Pem – Other Ways Of Landing EP
- Sébastien Tellier – Kiss The Beast
- Shackleton – Euphoria Bound
- Tsar B – The Writer
- Tyler Ballgame – For The First Time, Again
- Various – Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young & Pavement (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- Whitelands – Sunlight Echoes
- Ye – Bully
- Yumi Zouma – No Love Lost to Kindness
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.
