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 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums
Curtisy & owin – Get A Life!
Jobstown rapper Curtisy follows up last year’s hiiki-produced Beauty In The Beast mixtape, after his 2024 breakthrough What Was The Question. Get A Life! was made with Dublin producer owin started as a smaller project and snowballed into something more expansive, shaped by duality – with the physical vinyl reflects the yin and yang: two vinyl covers, front and back, light and dark. The title also pulls in two directions – an insult, some advice.
The sound palette of Get A Life! expands beyond a pure rap template to soul and hazy dream-pop texture. Curtisy sings more, experiments more, lets curiosity take the lead. Collaborations with Lil Skag across three tracks – ‘Talk of the Town’, ‘Yesterday’s News’ and ‘Bones’ capture Irish rap underground right now. ‘Sonny’, dedicated to his mother and named for his nephew, is the album’s still centre and a genuinely moving piece of songwriting. ‘My Friends’ with Emily Beattie finds Curtisy in full pop mode: dream-haze autotune, emotional candour, striking ease. It packs a lot in under 24 minutes.
“I can’t make music if I don’t go outside and live,” he says, “but it’s difficult to go out and live with the anxiety that I have.” Get A Life! documents that tension honestly. Release show today at Spindizzy Records in Dublin.
Joshua Burnside – It’s Not Going to be Okay (Nettwerk)
Belfast singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside wrote his new album after the death of his closest friend Dean Jendoubi in August 2024. “He drifted unawares into the deepest sleep,” Burnside says plainly. The album is what came out of the silence that followed, and quickly after 2025’s Teeth Of Time.
Gone are the dense layered textures and surreal folk tales of previous records like Teeth of Time. What replaced them are 10 bare, trembling songs that tell the truth in the most economical language possible. There are just his voice, warm acoustic guitar, the odd slip of strings, and the writing, which is among the best of his career.
“Grief has always been a big part of my music,” Burnside says. “It’s the reason I started writing songs when I was 13. And so, as I did all those years ago, I reach for the guitar, try a few chords and sing a few words and for a brief moment I feel like it’s going to be okay.”
Avalon Emerson & the Charm – Written Into Changes (Dead Oceans)
The electronic musician and eminent DJ’s second album under her Charm moniker is a step forward on every front: more groove-heavy, more dance-adjacent, more fully realised as a songwriter than the bedroomy textures of 2023’s self-titled debut, informed by translating the first album to the stage.
Written Into Changes was co-produced with Bullion, with additional contributions from Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend), and draws from five years of constant movement: touring as a DJ, relocating from Berlin to Los Angeles to New York, and the personal shifts those moves bring.
“Making Written into Changes felt like unlocking a fence and running into a big green field. I wanted to be more direct and vulnerable with my lyrics and voice, and for the instrumentation I wanted to be bolder. This album is a collection of songs about change, shards of life, and relationships whose echoes I still feel every day. I collaborated with old friends, like Bullion, Hunter and Keivon, and also new producers and musicians such as Rostam, Jay Flew, and other brilliant musicians. We made this record in the English countryside, London, and LA. I love making this kind of music and I’m so happy people can hear this album now.”
‘Eden’ has a baggy, late-80s dance-rock hybrid energy, ‘Jupiter and Mars’ is cathartic indie-pop ,while ‘Happy Birthday’ is frenetically joyful Caribou-esque synth pop with gently devastating lyrics: “Too young to die / Too old to break through.” ‘Country Mouse’ and ‘Eden’ are love songs for her wife Hunter Lombard. An album that embraces progress and refuses stasis.
Isa Gordon – 8Men (Lost Map Records)
Glasgow-based producer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Isa Gordon releases a second solo album digitally today, following a limited cassette run on Lost Map. 8Men builds on the layered electronic folk of her 2022 debut For You Only on Optimo Music (a record JD Twitch championed loudly before his death) but shifts the conceptual framework entirely.
These are eight tracks split evenly between four traditional folk songs and four covers from the 1970s, by Richard Thompson, Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt and Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ gets a trad ambient treatment. These songs are not faithful versions of traditional songs but cast anew with clubby electronics and modern production, anchored by Gordon’s expressive vocal.
The title and the conceit reclaims the narrative of songs by and about men: pointing out, among other things, that many old songs were actually written by women, their perspectives subtly altered in the transcription.
“It’s a bit of an ode to the format of the folk compilation; collections artists and singers make of songs that resonate with them. There are songs about love, war, family, relationships, womanhood. Like wee mini myths on the human condition. I hope it can shed a new light on some of these trad tunes – that they still live, because they are reinterpreted, and not stuck in what can sometimes feel like the stuffy constraints of ‘tradition’ (whatever that means). Music doesn’t happen in a vacuum, folk at its best embraces this in the oral tradition: hearing, resonating and retelling.”
The cover artwork is a tarot card painted by Gordon’s mother in the late 80s: The High Priestess, a woman eating an apple.
Ellie O’Neill – Time of Fallow (St. Itch)
The Meath singer-songwriter’s debut album was written in 10 days during the pandemic after she moved back into her family home, playing and recording late at night after everyone went to sleep, while simultaneously working on an English Literature thesis about Nightwood and queer temporality in the modernist novel. That context explains a lot about the atmosphere of Time of Fallow: intimate and night-lit, anxious and exact, full of articulate introspection.
The 10 acoustic songs have a soft glow Laura Marling intimate songwriting quality with O’Neill showcasing a gift for describing quiet moments with precision. The album was initially oriented around a specific person of affection, but O’Neill discovered something wider through the writing.
“It took all this to see it wasn’t about that person, but it was about me and the wider world. It was a portal for me to learn through.” Songs like ‘Silent Water’, ‘Half Immune’, ‘Little Sister’ and ‘Seabird’ make the case for her as one of Ireland’s most distinctive new songwriting voices.
O’Neill plays Bello Bar in Dublin on April 10th.
Grace Ives – Girlfriend (True Panther / Capitol)
Grace Ives’ 2022 album Janky Star was one of the most-praised small-scale indie pop records in years. And then she disappeared. After she got home from touring it, the rush became too much. “I hit a true rock bottom and have been finding my way out of the dark hole I dug for myself since then,” she wrote in an open letter last November. The years between were marked by alcoholism, isolation, and a life that had become brutally stagnant.
Girlfriend is the album that came out the other side. Written and produced with Ariel Rechtshaid (Charli XCX, Vampire Weekend, Kelela) and John DeBold (HAIM, Dora Jar), mixed by Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT), the 11 tracks are the most expansive and sonically ambitious music of her career to date. “I shifted from escaping to exploring,” she says. “Having some personal freedom made me realise that I’m allowed to take up space.” The album doesn’t wallow in the specifics of the dark period but uses it as a launchpad for songs about connection, being social again, learning to experiment, being honest.
Ladytron – Paradises (Nettwerk)
Liverpool electro-pop trio Ladytron return with their eighth studio album and their most significant leap since their 2005 apex Witching Hour. Paradises was written and recorded in an intense five-month burst starting in late 2023, across Liverpool, São Paulo, and Dalston, completed at Dean Street Studios in Soho, the same room where Tony Visconti recorded Bowie’s Scary Monsters. It was produced by band member Daniel Hunt and mixed by long-time collaborator Jim Abbiss. “Every time I went into the studio, I’d come out after an hour with a new track,” says Hunt. “The key motivation was fun.” The result is their most dance-oriented record since Light & Magic, blazing with colour and movement.
Described as “a luminescent collage of tech primitivism, high-priestess disco, spectral soul, and balearic noir.”
underscores – U (Mom+Pop)
April Harper Grey’s third album of dubstep pop as underscores is a self-titled-of-sorts, the title simultaneously shorthand for the artist, the object of desire that runs through the songs, and a declaration about the record’s whole orientation. “Music for malls, airports, hotels, supermarkets. I wrote these songs for U,” she says. After the complex fictional lore architecture of 2023’s Wallsocket, U strips back the conceptual scaffolding and focuses everything on maximalist pop craftsmanship. Influences cited: Jane Remover, 2hollis and Osamason sitting alongside Brandy, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.
Colleen – Libres antes del final (Thrill Jockey)
French multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott’s ninth album as Colleen is a genuinely unusual record with a genuinely unusual origin story. In April 2024 she confronted a 30-year water phobia by hiring an open water teacher and learning to swim again. The experience unlocked something profound – she noticed that taking that first few centimetres into open water took her longer than subsequently swimming 250 metres from shore. “Could this mean that everything in life works this way, that the first small step really is the hardest to take?” Libres antes del final (“Free before the ending”) is the direct result of that shift: five pieces composed entirely on Moog Matriarch at home in Barcelona, then reamped inside the Barcelona venue Casa Montjuïc, where carefully placed microphones captured both the PA sound and the room’s acoustics.
This electronic and ambient album is an ode to movement, to the body, to urgency, to repairing old wounds and starting over.
Coby Sey – Passengers (Cardinal Loom)
The Lewisham-based multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and NTS Radio host releases the 21-minute 5-track largely instrumental release digitally (an expanded vinyl follows May 2nd). Passengers arrives on his own Cardinal Loom imprint, four years after Conduit (2022) announced him on AD 93 as one of the most genuinely singular voices in London’s experimental music scene. It was a record that fused sedated hip-hop, drone, grime, jazz and eerie spaced-out electronics into something that felt entirely self-authored.
Sey’s world absorbs everything around him – the deep South London sonic lineage he’s embedded in, his work with Tirzah, Mica Levi, his NTS show’s arc from glacial ambience through soul and post-rock and refracts it through an instinct for emotional weight and sustained experimentalism.
Anna Calvi – Is This All There Is? EP (Domino)
The first instalment in a planned trilogy of records exploring identity as metamorphosis, shaped by Calvi’s own perspective shift after becoming a parent. Four tracks, four legendary collaborators, each functioning as a character in a cinematic soundscape: Iggy Pop, Perfume Genius, Laurie Anderson and The National’s Matt Berninger. “They share a kind of subversive honesty,” Calvi says. “They’re not trying to please anyone.” These are not vanity collaborations, each voice has been matched to an arrangement that draws out something specific.
Opener ‘God’s Lonely Man’ pairs Pop’s gruff baritone against Calvi’s whistling falsetto over an unrelenting, ominous rhythm that straddles groove and punk. It’s one of the most distinctive things she’s done. ‘I See A Darkness’ is a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy cover featuring Perfume Genius, expanding into something spectral and haunted. Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ with Laurie Anderson is the most off-beat entry p Anderson delivering the lyrics as if reading them for the first time in real time. The title track with Berninger was originally written for Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II.
Barnburner – Nothing to Hold EP
Barnburner is a two piece from Dublin consisting of David McGuane and Pippa Molony trading in introspective alternative folk and indie pop and this EP is produced Daniel Montague O’Brien.
“The five-track EP, is a culmination of everything we’ve made so far. There are songs that feel more Irish folk adjacent, and then there’s stuff that leans more pop/country. So it has a lot of variety, though it’s small. I think it’s our best work. Looking back on the project, a lot of the songs circle around the idea of transience. That’s particularly strong in our song Hills. There’s this feeling in the song of something being over, I think it is lamenting that perhaps this amazing time away has ended. The EP title comes from a line in that song: ‘a long drive home, your shoulder on mine, nothing to hold.’”
Live Dates
April 3rd – The Cobblestone, Dublin (Headline show with Ian Nyquist & Isaac Jones)
May 21st – International Literature Festival Dublin
IX Falls – The Fastest Way To Kill Something Special EP
Dundalk hyperpop producer drops an eight-track collection of electronic productions that mirror the EP cover – bright, busy, patterned and full of movement. IX Fall$ was featured for this track last year.
mclusky – i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley EP (Ipecac)
Cardiff’s finest continue their post-reunion streak with a six-song mini-album on Ipecac, arriving digitally today and on vinyl May 1st. Four new tracks plus two previously digital-only songs, timed to coincide with their North American tour starting March 24th. It’s definitively, joyfully mclusky – skeletal post-hardcore built on Damien Sayell’s prominent bass, Andrew ‘Falco’ Falkous’ guitar stabs and a completely undiminished talent for sarcastic, skronky, propulsive rock music.
Also released this week
- Alessia Cara – Love Or Lack Thereof
- Carlos Niño & Friends – Bubble Bath For Giants
- Eamon Daly – The Whole Thing
- Hurray for the Riff Raff – Live Forever
- IX Falls – The Fastest Way To Kill Something Special EP
- Jerry Paper – BOiNK! EP
- Kid Cudi – Have U BN 2 Heaven @ Nite?
- Nessa Barrett – Jesus Loves a Primadonna
- Nubiyan Twist – Chasing Shadows
- Red Axes – Fabric Mix
- Selah Sue & The Gallands – ‘Movin’
- St. Vincent – Live In London (BBC Proms)
- The Dandy Warhols – PIN UPS
- The Ocelots – Revisions EP
- The Twilight Sad – It’s The Long Goodbye
- The Undercover Dream Lovers – Atomic House
- Witch Post – Butterfly
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.
