The best new Irish songs this week feature emerging tracks we’ve selected from artists from the island of Ireland, with more recommendations below.
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For more extensive Irish and new music coverage, read the Irish section for individual track features.
Goldbug
Blink
Goldbug is the moniker of Dublin-based Irish/French artist Danilo Ward, raised in a religious commune in rural Provence and priming one of the more quietly singular albums to come out of Ireland this year.
‘Blink’ is the latest single from his independently released debut album Swings & Roundabouts, due June 26th, and co-produced with Chris W Ryan (NewDad, Just Mustard) and mastered by Heba Kadry (Bjork, Big Thief).
With influences touching Slint, Battles, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and his own background as bassist in Dublin dream pop band Of All Living Things, ‘Blink’ plays with unconventional song structures and odd time signatures. Danilo describes it as nonlinear by design – a mirror to a nomadic upbringing, twisting and restless but probing and inquisitive.
The video, a homage to 80s sci-fi horror (Carpenter’s The Thing, The Fly) features a giant insect head he built himself. It tracks with the rest of the project’s sensibility: art rock, lo-fi electronics, neoclassical textures, and a fascination with forgotten places and the things that live in them.
“Being raised as a missionary kid, I had a weird childhood and teenage years, they were very non linear. I was constantly uprooted, I found it hard to make close friends because I knew I’d be losing them. I protected myself, went inward, and this loneliness followed me into adulthood. I wrote Blink sitting with these feelings. The song was inspired by the scene in the movie Inception where the van is falling off the bridge in slow motion, but all the characters are still stuck in dreamland trying to get a job done. I wrote it as a reflection on the kind of thoughts I’d have in the moments before crashing into the sea if my car went over a cliff. I was into really non linear music at the time, weird song structures and odd time signatures. I loved Slint and Battles. Blink was me experimenting with all that stuff, writing a song that is a journey with several stages.’
Goldbug plays Bello Bar, Dublin on July 3rd for the album launch.
Sloucho
All Night
Sloucho is building out a project called Broken Spirit – five monthly singles across 2026 and ‘All Night’ is the second instalment after ‘Love Is Fear’. Where the first single set a darker, more intense tone, this one pulls back into something slower and more vulnerable: emo digi-pop, digitised vocals over robotic synths, a soft-focus love song for the online era that deals with co-dependency, projection and what happens when closeness doesn’t mean connection. Dare I say Charli XCX vibes?
The Irish multidisciplinary artist is building a self-developed video game as part of the wider Broken Spirit world. There’s a coherence to all of it – club textures, Irish folklore, DIY digital environments – that makes the whole thing feel like more than just a singles run. Released on his own OUCH imprint.
ActionRec
Feel The Groove
ActionRec are a Dublin-based artistic collective built around siblings Ro and Seán Graham, who release music, short films and abstract art as one interconnected practice. ‘Feel The Groove’ is their fourth single of 2026 and the fifth taken from an album arriving in May. It’s a shaker of a tune with touches of piano-house and bluesy acid jazz grooves.
The collective is family-run in a literal sense – managed by their parents Niall and Mags – and operates as a DIY unit across every part of what they do. Find them and their shop at actionrec.com.
AE MAK
Love Free
Aoife McCann, who records as Ae Mak, has been building a reputation for other-worldly art pop for years now and it’s all coming to a head on the upcoming debut album Folk Songs for Mama & Papa, due May 29th via Spacer Records, and it marks a significant shift in her sound – away from character-driven pop and toward something more stripped and elemental.
We’ve heard ‘Famous’ written with Talos, ‘We Came From Stars’ and the title track so far.
Built around spacious piano, choral harmonies and her unmistakably intimate voice, third album single ‘Love Free’ sits in the tension between devotion and self-preservation. The track was written and recorded in the Berlin apartment she lived in, with the video shot there on an old film camera by her friend Tim Shearwood – Vaseline and clingfilm on the lens, staging referenced from the Bohemian Rhapsody video, heads lit in the dark. Aoife describes the song as a plea made toward love that couldn’t be:
“Love Free is based in romantic relationship – if you can love me right, I will expand out into all that I am and I will move with all my being to give and be the same for you.
But it’s about the wider heart consciousness and the reason why we are all here – to love and be loved and to walk the path we’ve chosen, been given, whatever you believe to be true, with inner trust.
It is still heartbreaking when I listen back to this song. I was pleading, offering myself to a love that couldn’t be. Feeling alone, hurting but willing to hurt to believe it.
Willing it – creating it into reality, painting it, praying it through showering love and praise. We are such beautiful beings – I’m looking back on myself a year and a half ago exactly in that place and looking at her with admiration – so lost and vulnerable fighting for love in whirls of fear and uncertainty – calling out for guidance and remembering what true connection to spirit, love, feels like within herself.”
Ae Mak plays Workman’s Club on July 23rd and instores Spindizzy Dublin 5:30pm, May 30th – Music Zone Cork 1pm and May 30th – Steamboat Limerick 5pm
The Leon Stax Equation
Do You Really Want Me
Leon Stax is a Galway-based multi-instrumentalist and producer whose sound builds a chassis of soul music and layers in jazz, funk, rock and psychedelia on top. ‘Do You Really Want Me’ was recorded live in the band’s barn studio with minimal overdubbing, with New York-based singer Paul Spring brought in to add vocals on the choruses. The subject matter is a friendship that’s run its course – what it actually feels like to have to break up with someone who doesn’t get you.
The track is part of a push toward their fourth album In View out on May 8th along with gigs in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick.
Holly Munro
Big Kids
Holly Munro has been building a reputation for introspective songwriting since her debut in 2023 and her 2024 EP while sharing stages with Local Natives, Morgana and James Vincent McMorrow.
‘Big Kids’ is her warmest and most specific song yet – a warm, guitar-led track about living with your closest friends in your twenties and knowing, even while you’re in it, that it won’t last. The subject matter is the ordinary moments that quietly accumulate into something you only fully recognise later.
Produced by Rián Trench, the arrangement is open and stripped back. The most considered detail is that Munro layered actual voice memos from her former housemates – Ali, Brendan, Eva, Meg, Oisín and Tadhg – into the backing vocals, which gives the song a specific weight that studio singers couldn’t replicate.
“Big Kids is about living with your closest friends in your twenties and knowing, even while you’re in it, that it’s a beautiful temporary thing. It came from thinking about all those ordinary moments that end up meaning everything (making tea at midnight, making music together, decorating a house with your dreams). It’s nostalgic, but not sad. It’s really about gratitude.”
Blue Niall
Every Single Venue Got Bought Out
Dublin rapper, artist and Irish language activist Blue Niall has been developing OISÍN – multimedia project retelling the myth of Oisín and Tír na nÓg through bilingual hip-hop. The first tape Éalú was nominated for Best Project at the Nós Awards. The project sold out a one-person show at Dublin Fringe Festival. Instead of leaving on a white horse, OISÍN leaves on a Ryanair plane.
‘Every Single Venue Got Bought Out’ is the centrepiece single from CÚMHA (meaning grief, longing, homesickness), the second chapter of the OISÍN project, out tomorrow May 1st. The song is exactly what the title promises: a direct reckoning with the disappearance of Dublin’s independent venue culture. 84% of nightclubs in Ireland have shut since the year 2000.
A sean nós sample from ‘Eleanor na Rún’ threads through underneath, answering the implicit question of why you’d still care about a city doing this to itself. “It’s an elegy, but not a surrender,” he says.
Bálordabreen
Horse Teeth
The second single from Bálordabreen’s second tape hols, ‘Horse Teeth’ deals with the struggle to find purpose and to follow through on it. It’s a direct, plainly-stated laid-back piece of rap from an artist operating well outside the usual promotional circuits. Self-submitted, self-released, and arriving with a directness that’s hard to fake.
The Lags
With Kitty I’ll Go
The Lags are a Dublin folk five-piece – Caden Condron, Oisín Reilly, Caroline Farrell, Shea Moloney and Seb Moneley – and ‘With Kitty I’ll Go’ is their take on a traditional tune they first encountered through a Dermot Barry rendition, then later through the Waterson:Carthy version. A song of unrequited love and isolation, it’s been in their repertoire since they started playing folk music together, and they’ve been working toward recording it ever since.
The arrangement centres on Shea’s drum line and Caden’s vocals, set against Oisín’s guitar and Caroline’s shruti drone. A considered, unhurried piece of folk work.
Shenanygans
Missed The Warning
Shenanygans are an Irish-Swiss indie rock band based in Solothurn, Switzerland, built around Limerick brothers Dan and Kaylem Hannon-Barry on guitars and shared vocals, alongside Swiss drummer Tom Brunner and Swiss-Polish bassist Luki Hellmann. The brothers grew up in Abbeyfeale and Shannon, both steeped in traditional Irish music, and that lineage sits underneath a sound that draws from 60s and 70s garage rock, Britpop, new wave and more recent reference points like Djo and Rex Orange County.
They’ve been at this seriously for a couple of years now – debut album On Monte Verìta in 2024, a 12-show Japan tour, an EP in early 2025, stages at Montreux Jazz Festival. ‘Missed The Warning’ is out on Ice Cream Man Records and arrives as they work toward their new album Lullabies and Lucid Dreams, now with Max Nyafli added on keys and vocals. An Irish-lead band doing a lot of their work outside Ireland which you probably have yet to encounter.
For more extensive Irish and new music coverage, check into the Irish section for individual track features…
We are prioritising Youtube / Bandcamp embeds where possible.
Other Playlist additions this week:
- WineMom – Everest
- Crying Loser – Eat The Evidence – album review
- Salamay – YAH
- cbakl; SOLOMON – TAXIDERM
- hikii – GUIDEBOOK
- Video Blue – Rise
- Blimp; Gleezy – The Way It Was – Gleezy Remix
- the thing is… – I Would Rather
- New Spectrum – Need You (One More Time)
- Rosie Carney – love so blind – night tapes
- Olive Hatake – PS4.X
- McGrath – Rotha
- Patrick stefan – Ever really know
- Lucy Blue – Who You Love
- Pagan – Take a Bite
- SexyTadhg – The Slag of Carlow Town
- Dose – Shelley
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.
