The Dublin artist has a new album on the way, the followup to 2021’s The Heat Death of My Hometown.

Jimbo Jones is back with new single ‘Modern-Day Business Man’, featuring Dublin rapper Curtisy.

It’s the follow-up to his 2021 debut album The Heat Death of My Hometown, a concept record built around gentrification, emigration and the erosion of Dublin’s cultural spaces, which featured samples from Emmet Kirwan, Kojaque and Una Mullally and donated its proceeds to CATU.

‘Modern-Day Business Man’ takes a satirical swing at modern commerce, drawing a line between entrepreneurs and the criminal underground, and features a verse from Curtisy to boot. I love the song’s frenetic energy and choral vocals. I’m excited to hear more from chapter two which Jimbo has been working on for the guts of the last five years.

‘Modern-Day Business Man” is out now on Bandcamp.

Modern-Day Business Man lyrics

Split the bag and call it coke.
Cut that shit fine, sell it as bespoke
Vitamins, vitamins, minerals Ritalin,
Partake of the fruit, silver tongue starts slithering,
Drop to the floor, I see you wriggling,
One crisp crunch, and now I got you dribbling,
Moving up and down, is that Mr Kipling?
Let them eat cake, call it asset stripping.

Silver spoon boon, my ascension.
Watch them line up, that’s succession.
Left for dead, but I ain’t no killer,
Keep it economic like ya boy Bell, Stringer,
Keep it theologic, all hail Max Weber,
Landlord at the door shouting stand and deliver!

I’m a liar, I’m a stealer,
By divine right cause I’m a believer,
Modern day business man, yeah that’s the plan,
Buy low sell high, then preach it like I’m chaplain.

I’m a liar, I’m a stealer,
By divine right cause I’m a believer,
Modern day business man, yeah that’s the plan,
Buy low sell high, then preach it like I’m chaplain.

Why you blue for?
I see the window shut but there’s a new door.
I been busy since I busted out the Coombe door.
Comb over the hair, I’m not known to prepare, I’m staying lukewarm.
I want the fruits, want the loot that the suits got,
It’s a stickup, don’t hiccup, no one move.
Had me legs on the poof, had me fingers on the pulse,
You’re tuned into the truth get your groove on.
Get your hands up,
Instagram told me get me bands up,
So I had to man up,
Bally for the cameras,
Robin Hood backwards,
Give me what I asked for,
Baby I’m a bastard.

I’m a liar, I’m a stealer,
By divine right cause I’m a believer,
Modern day business man, yeah that’s the plan,
Buy low sell high, then preach it like I’m chaplain.

I’m a liar, I’m a stealer,
By divine right cause I’m a believer,
Modern day business man, yeah that’s the plan,
Buy low sell high, then preach it like I’m chaplain.

I’m a liar, I’m a stealer,
By divine right cause I’m a believer,
Modern day business man, yeah that’s the plan,
Buy low sell high, then preach it like I’m chaplain.

I’m a liar, I’m a stealer,
By divine right cause I’m a believer.

The festival’s cult-favourite roaming trolley gets its own dedicated forest stage, built from upcycled festival plastics and centred on Irish club culture, rap and underground music.

The EP announcements keep coming.

Electric Picnic has announced the lineup for GlowDepot, a new stage built out of one of the festival’s longest-running pieces of folklore. For years, the GlowDepot was the chaotic upcycled shopping trolley, topped with a glowing LED umbrella, that rolled through the main arena after dark handing out glowsticks to unsuspecting punters. Fifteen years on, that same crew now has its own dedicated stage in the woods.

The main stage was designed by Forja Works, styled after a retro petrol station canopy and built over the summer using upcycled plastics collected from festivals around Ireland. Art-rave collective Sacred Stone flank it with a sprawling urban cityscape, pulling on 90s graffiti and crumbling concrete for the set design.

By day, the stage runs a lineup of emerging and established acts: Sugabooo, Avenue 68, Lil Skag, Outstraight Records, Fortune Igiebor, Jeorge II, Saibhin, Empty Internet, Smokey, Salamay, Mount Pyrus, Together As One, Danzi and Phallout. Underground rap collective Catacombs also curate an afternoon set featuring Omen, Survival, Ruka, Beddyminaj, Nos, Jugo Yyung, Babyfacee and Desires.

After dark, GlowDepot becomes a late-night club space built around Irish club culture, with sets from Ev Wilde, NewEra, Sloucho, JenTen, Jessica Maciel, Mo Cultivation, Asylum Residents, Boss Events, Manwelli, Mills, Vasuki Red and RNL. King Kong Company launch the stage with a special DJ set for early arrivals on Thursday night.

A basketball-themed side stage, Courtside, runs alongside the main stage, powered by Super Average DJs, with a rotating Courtside Caravan lineup including Aneta Moran Sax, SX2, DJ Chartini, Kiki D, Mick G, Mookie, Fergal D’Arcy, Bren Curtis, Thxtti, Nancy Wilde, Nia Byrd, DJ Ozz G and DJ Bongani.

Dirty Circus run pop-up performances and roaming theatre across the site throughout the weekend, closing with a Dirty Breakfast show on Sunday morning featuring DJ Betzy Nina.

Main stage:

• Newera
• Sugabooo
• Avenue 68
• Lil Skag
• King Kong Company (DJ set)
• Ev Wilde
• Sloucho (DJ set)
• Jenten
• Outstraight
• Jessica Maciel
• Fortune Igiebor
• Jeorge II
• Saibhin
• Danzi
• Salamay
• Mo Cultivation
• Vasuki Red
• Smokey
• Empty Internet
• Survival
• Ruka
• Beddyminaj
• Nos
• Jugo Yyung
• Babyfacee
• Omen
• Desires
• Betzy Nina
• Manwelli
• RNL
• Phallout
• Asylum
• Mills
• Shiloh Grey
• Abbey Blu
• Angel Rose
• Mount Pyrus
• Together As One
• Mister Kyb
• Nuclearmaso

Courtside Stage:

• Super Average DJs
• Aneta Moran & Guest
• SX2
• DJ Chartini
• Kiki D
• Mick G
• Mookie
• Fergal D’Arcy
• Bren Curtis
• Thxtti
• Nancy Wilde
• Nia Byrd
• DJ Ozz G
• DJ Bongani

Also featuring:

• Dirty Circus
• Mambo Caravan
• Sacred Stone
• Catacombs
• Emorah Collective
• Boss Events
• Vicegrips
• Heavyweights

GlowDepot is curated by Alan Mulhall and John Kenny, with music and production support from Fluttertone.

Spotify is to label artists with AI identities and exclude them from algorithm recommendations with its new Artist Persona tag but AI generated songs can still escape the badge.

Spotify announced yesterday that it will begin applying an AI Persona badge to artist profiles from mid-September, the platform’s most direct move yet on the flood of AI music to date.

Artists can now self-disclose through Spotify for Artists that their profile represents an AI Persona. Spotify says it won’t rely on that alone, and will also review profiles itself and apply badges where it decides a public identity is artificial.

The badge will appear in the profile banner and About section, in search results, and on track rows inside playlists. Tapping it will tell listeners whether the artist disclosed voluntarily or whether Spotify’s review team made the call.

Badged profiles are excluded by default from editorial and algorithmic recommendations, so an AI Persona shouldn’t turn up in Discover Weekly or a Spotify-curated playlist unless you have followed it directly which is a very good thing.

Artists badged without disclosing are notified and can appeal. In the coming months, Spotify says listeners will also be able to report profiles they suspect are AI Personas.

It sounds like the labelling system critics have been asking Spotify for since The Velvet Sundown racked up its first million plays. So this solves most of the problem with AI-generated music right?

Wait, There is an issue

The issue is down to Spotify’s decision to focus not on the music but the artist profile. AI personas only applies to the profile picture the artist is using not the actual music – AI generated or not – that is the criteria addressed by other streaming services.

Spotify’s answer to the “how was it made” question is its existing AI Credits system, which is voluntary, and SongDNA, which is a credits and contributor tool rather than a detection tool.

Deezer tags both the artist and the track

Compare that to what Deezer has been doing since June 2025. Deezer tags the track, using detection rather than disclosure, and it has been publishing the numbers: over 13.4 million AI tracks detected and tagged in 2025, more than 60,000 arriving daily, roughly 39% of everything delivered to the platform.

Spotify’s badge does not detect a single one of those songs. It detects whether the profile picture looks like a person who doesn’t exist.

Using ‘Rubberz’ as an example

Here’s a real world example – a song of the summer contender if you will.

Fenix Flexin, the Shoreline Mafia rapper, released ‘Rubberz’ on Friday June 5th, a synth-pop track with a British-accented vocal a long way from his West Coast rap catalogue. It went viral and got called the song of the summer.

Accusations that it was AI-generated started almost immediately. Listeners pointed out that the vocal didn’t sound like him, that it hit notes he’d never demonstrated in a decade of releases, and that the genre was one he’d never attempted. Timbaland, one of the industry’s loudest AI evangelists, came to his defence, which helped nobody.

Fenix denied it for two months, as did his producer Purps On The Beat. He told one commenter the track was recorded the same as all his music, with the only additions being Auto-Tune, reverb and a fake UK accent. Asked directly in an interview whether there was AI on the song, he said there wasn’t.

Then the producer Medasin published a forensic breakdown pointing to Treblo, the generative platform formerly known as Sonauto. Fenix responded with a video walking through a Pro Tools session with the song split into stems, apparently as proof he’d built it by hand. Medasin and others noted you can get the same result by running a finished AI track through a stem splitter. The video was deleted.

The Verge ran its own analysis and found artefacts and anomalies common to AI-generated music: brittle hi-hats, chorus vocals with the character of a low-bitrate MP3, reverb tails cutting off unnaturally. Charlie Harding of Switched On Pop tied that degradation to training data, arguing the audible mush comes from models trained on low-quality MP3s of unlicensed copyrighted material.

Treblo’s co-founder then said the song had been made on the platform, and the company’s own detection tool flagged it, though that tool’s accuracy hasn’t been independently verified.

On Friday August 7th, Fenix folded, sort of. In an Instagram reply he said “never said I didn’t use AI”, that it had nothing to do with the recording process, and that there’s nothing wrong with using new technology as a tool. Tyga made a near-identical argument about his $tarface project the same week, also reportedly made with Treblo. Neither of them is sorry about it.

Now apply Spotify’s new badge to that.

Fenix Flexin is a real person. Real name, real face, real photographs (but also AI artwork as above), a real decade-long career, a real profile that a real human runs. He would not receive an AI Persona badge. On the criteria Spotify published this week he would more plausibly qualify for a Verified by Spotify tick, the badge that exists to signal you’re listening to an authentic human artist.

Meanwhile the song has what multiple analyses describe as an AI-generated vocal, and it charted. It is already logged as the first fully AI-generated song to reach a major US chart.

Spotify’s other tool for this, AI Credits, is voluntary. It would have required Fenix to disclose in the credits the exact thing he spent two months publicly denying in interviews. The disclosure model assumes good faith from precisely the people who have the most to gain from not offering it.

What actually exposed ‘Rubberz’ was a working producer doing forensic listening, a tech publication running spectral analysis, and the AI company itself confirming it. Spotify had no interest in declaring this either way.

Days after the story broke, the IFPI published guiding principles for the chart eligibility of AI-generated and AI-assisted tracks.

“Photorealistic” AI profiles

Spotify says its review team will look for profiles that “appear to represent photorealistic AI-generated identities.”

The slop economy that has drained the royalty pool does not run on convincing fake headshots. It runs on ambient, lo-fi, sleep, focus and background country uploads with abstract cover art and no persona at all, exactly the shape of the Perfect Fit Content and ghost artist model Liz Pelly documented in Mood Machine.

An illustrated persona, an anime avatar, a masked act, an artist photo can be a stylistic choice that doesn’t obviously automatically mean “looks like a person.” or necessarily AI artist. It’s the music we should be tagging here?

Defined audience thresholds

Spotify says it will “start with artists who have met defined audience thresholds, so the labels cover the vast majority of artist profiles that users visit.”

That means the enforcement is aimed at profiles listeners already visit, which is a reasonable use of a finite moderation team and also an admission that the long tail is not being reviewed.

The long tail is also where new AI artists come from. It is where the fraudulent streaming exists, where the mass uploads come from, and where the dilution of the royalty pool happens, in a system that already requires a song to hit 1,000 streams in 12 months before it earns anything at all.

There is nothing in this about money

The announcement never once mentions royalties.

An AI Persona loses recommendation placement which is a blow for AI art (boo hoo) but they can still get paid. Its streams still count and still come out of the same finite pot that pays the artists you actually go to see in Whelan’s. Worth being aware of.

Deezer demonetises AI music completely: it reports that up to 85% of streams on AI-generated music are detected as fraudulent, and those are removed from the royalty pool entirely. Qobuz has contractual clauses prohibiting the delivery of 100% AI-generated content and a stated zero-tolerance policy.

Bandcamp went furthest of all in January, with a policy that music “generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted” on the platform. That phrase, in substantial part, is the one Spotify has spent a year and five separate features avoiding. It puts the threshold on the work, and it means somebody has to make a judgement about the songs rather than the headshot.

When I covered this in January, Deezer’s figure for AI-generated daily uploads was 18%. By February it was 39%. Whatever Spotify updates in September is landing in a market that is doubling.

Spotify labels it, demotes it but keeps hosting it. Engagement is Spotify’s business. Daniel Ek’s line that the company’s “only competitor is silence” has not stopped being true because there’s a new badge.

Spotify’s AI journey

There are now five separate authenticity signals on the platform: Verified by Spotify, AI Credits, SongDNA, Artist Details and Artist Profile Protection, and now AI Persona.

Spotify has also told us it removed over 75 million spammy tracks in the year to September 2025. Since then we’ve had The Velvet Sundown, Xania Monet, the AI metal band Broken Avenue and a tier of acts built to dupe existing artists, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard among them. King Gizzard are one of the bands who pulled their music off Spotify. They got cloned there anyway.

And as I noted in January, this is the same company that has an agreement with Sony, Universal, Warner, Merlin and Believe to build “artist-first AI music products” with it, and which holds a patent for AI-generated song mashups. The three majors in that list have separately licensed their catalogues to Suno and Udio for training.

So majors license the catalogue to the generators, the generators produce the output, the output lands on Spotify, and Spotify puts a badge on whichever profile pictures look too smooth? What if you put a picture of yourself up but are uploading AI tracks all the same?

So is it worth anything?

Yes it is but not without those caveats explained above. It is more than Spotify has done before, the recommendation exclusion has actual impact, and forcing a disclosure question into Spotify for Artists sets a norm the rest of the industry can be measured against.

But it is a badge on a face, applied to accounts that are already popular, by the company that profits from the streams, with no consequence for the money.

The question I keep coming back to, as I wrote in January, isn’t whether a platform will tell you a thing is fake. It’s whether the platform is built to care.

After all, Spotify is not morally opposed to AI music, having this past May announced that it will allow its users to remix and cover existing hit songs from Universal with AI tools.

Earlier this year, Qobuz also  published a charter with redlines, contractual prohibitions and a commitment to pull catalogues. That’s how fast a company can move when the answer is straightforward.

Deezer demonetises AI music completely.

Bandcamp has banned all AI-generated music.

Qobuz is actively removing AI songs and releases when identified.

Spotify has a badge but won’t demonetise remove any AI songs.

Spotify has had two years and has arrived at a sticker, as that is as far as their bottom line is willing to go.

Dublin Gig Guide Highlights:August 11th to 17th: Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival with Shamrock Showband, Molly Donnery, Emma Langford, Kíla and more, Shearling, Smokey’s Cookout, Replay Festival, Intrinsic Rhythm, Black Helium, Bob Log III, Rattling Ark, lxverboy.

Dublin venues, clubs and bars – A guide

Skip to day: Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat | Sun | Mon

Tuesday August 11th

Joji, Tommy Richman @ 3Arena (6:30pm)
George Miller – Japanese-Australian singer, producer and former internet personality – plays 3Arena on the SOLARIS Tour, with Tommy Richman in support.

Honky Tonk Tuesdays @ Arthur’s
2 step dance class followed by The Dublin Club playing the best of honky tonk. Free in.

Wednesday August 12th

Gráda, Christof Van Der Ven @ Whelan’s (8pm)
[Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival] Irish/New Zealand quintet Gráda with support from London-based Netherlands singer-songwriter Christof Van Der Ven.

lxverboy & friends @ The Grand Social Ballroom
lxverboy is a classically trained percussionist, producer and composer blending orchestral, ambient, hip-hop and cinematic sounds in her electronic solo project. Plus LEWWAB DJ set and sage.like.

Cultúr @ The Grand Social
Lineup: Dash!, Bullpen, Badger Bui, Window Seat, Cicada and more.

Thursday August 13th

Rattling Ark @ Whelan’s Upstairs (8pm)
[Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival] The Irish alternative trad/folk/experimental project led by Slow Moving Clouds’ Kevin Murphy with Thomas Haugh, Lizzi Murtough and Aki recently released a fine debut album.

Title TK, medium pace, Spring Cleaning @ Anseo
A night of alternative rock, grunge and post-hardcore.

YHRF @ The Big Romance
Hip-hop, soul and funk from the Young Hearts crew.

Red Line Jazz @ The Circular
Weekly jazz sess in Rialto.

chroma4ever001 @ Wigwam (11pm)
[Breakcore / jungle] Dazegxd, Harmful Logic, DJ Kuroneko and more.

Friday August 14th

Bob Log III @ The Sugar Club
American one-man blues spectacle Bob Log III plays the Sugar Club. He plays slide guitar while simultaneously drumming with his feet and singing through a telephone receiver microphone attached to his motorcycle helmet. Completely ridiculous and brilliant.

Kíla @ Whelan’s (8pm)
[Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival] Long running Irish trad band who reach euphoric heights.

Black Helium, Unique Freaks @ Bello Bar
London’s psych-rock trio headline with Thee UFO / Unique Freaks supporting.

Saol, Cornerman @ Thomas House
SAOL is a new solo project of Irish artist Zoë Gough (Dreaming Of Jupiter). Her debut album, currently in the works will feature indie, 90s grunge, shoegaze and folk.

Tadhg K b2b Bull Horris @ The Big Romance
House, prog, queer-explorations.

Late Clubs and DJs

Groove Crew @ Rascal’s Loft (8pm – 1am)
House music selectors and a bar in Inchicore.

Intrinsic Rhythm x Kriptik @ Pawn Shop (11pm)
Tr One,Hooligan and Ashes pay tribute to Beanzy, the Cork DJ who sadly died at Love is a Stranger Festival.

Equinox presents: Pancratio @ Tengu (11pm)
Berlin-based Italian producer of house.

Skip to day: Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat | Sun | Mon

Saturday August 15th

Replay Festival @ Parthalán Place, Tallaght (10am – 6pm)
RePlay brings together skateboarding, live music, graffiti, dance and street culture for a free, open-access day in South Dublin County Council’s newest public space. The main music stage runs a full-day programme building from family-friendly sets into evening performances, with a Live Rap Cypher, a NOISE Music takeover and a headline closing performance. The NOISE Music Cypher Project supports young DJs, producers and MCs to develop and perform new work alongside established artists throughout the day. Live music from The Hot Sprockets, DJ Escobar, Seanem, DJ Ellie and more.

Citrus present Disco Day Party @ Beatyard (2pm – 10pm)
Free Entry. Blancnoir, Donnie and Special Branch spinning classic disco and house.

Smokey’s Cookout @ Hen’s Teeth (4pm)
London MC Lord Apex with Smokey, Helmut b2b George Tablemaker

Shamrock Showband @ Whelan’s (8pm)
[Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival] If Father Ted and CMAT had a baby: Shamrock Showband are the new Irish country band to get to know.

Shearling @ The Grand Social (7:30pm)
American experimental melodic post-rock band.

UNDERACHIEVER & THE LETDOWNS @ Bello Bar
Dublin indie folk punk band. Adventures In Disappointment.

Kenny Hanlon @ The Big Romance
Soul, funk, dance, leftfield.

Late Clubs and DJs

LOVECATS 80s/90s club night @ The Grand Social (9pm)
In aid of CDPA / Cat & Dog Protection Association of Ireland.

Giovanni Grooves @ Tengu (11pm)
ChildsMind, DJ Get Luc(y) and Lips2Ears (Cian Bolger / D*MP / Eoin Boyle DJ Set).

Expansion presents Medalla @ Hang Dai (11pm)
All Night Long. Expect a wide selection of chuggy house cuts influenced by Detroit and Chicago, alongside more club-focused house and tech house, with a few curveballs thrown in for good measure.

The Source Vol. 3 @ Opium (10:30pm)
Old school Hip Hop and RnB 90s and early 2000s. DJs Onai, Luke, Dacosta, Mc Kellz.

Skip to day: Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat | Sun | Mon

Sunday August 16th

Emma Langford @ Whelan’s (8pm)
[Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival] Limerick singer-songwriter.

L.Weary, David deBarra @ Anseo
Gem Beag Anseo experimental series. DeBarra’s recent album is one of Ireland’s best this year.

Organ Freeman @ The Big Romance (6pm)
Live jazz every Sunday. Brian Gallagher from 9pm.

Skip to day: Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat | Sun | Mon

Monday August 17th

Molly Donnery @ Whelan’s (8pm)
[Whelan’s Trad & Folk Festival] Dublin folk singer.

Song Cycle @ Whelan’s Bar
Whelan’s weekly free singer-songwriter night.

Terraplana, Burglar @ The Grand Social
Brazilian alternative band with Irish/Brazilian duo on support.

Dublin venues, clubs and bars – A guide

Jerry Fish’s late-night carnival village celebrates five years at Stradbally with its usual circus, cabaret and burlesque programming along with OTT Wrestling.

Fish Town is back at Electric Picnic for a fifth year, and ringmaster Jerry Fish is promising a bigger, wilder edition than ever. Set deep in the woods at Stradbally, the village is built around The Jerry Fish Electric Sideshow Circus Tent, three pop-up sideshow stages and The Heart and Anchor Bar, all populated by circus, cabaret, burlesque, pole, drag and sideshow walkabout performers throughout the weekend.

Two new additions headline the programme this year. There’s a trad rave, Dustin the Turkey is doing SOMETHING, and for the first time at the festival, Jerry Fish is bringing in OTT Wrestling, a live wrestling show mixing genuine athleticism with chaotic, crowd-driven theatre.

Music-wise, expect sets from MayKay, Jinx Lennon, Rowetta, Babyrat, Shobsy and Malaki, alongside house DJs like The Kilo 1977 and Kelly-Anne Byrne.

The sideshow programming has doubled in size for this edition too, with performances from Fire and Pole Queens, Fierce Family Troupe, The Pony Girls, Regina & The Queens’ drag show, Time Travel Theatre, Wobbly Circus, Miss Mary Jane, Dirty Circus and more, alongside a “The End of the World Party” featuring secret special guests.

Fish Town lineup:

• The Jerry Fish Electric Sideshow
• MayKay
• Jinx Lennon
• Rowetta
• Shobsy
• OTT Wrestling
• Trad Rave
• Dustin the Turkey
• Billy Scurry, Kelly-Anne Byrne
• Sinéad Ní Mhórdha
• Babyrat
• Decks & Drums / The Kilo 1977 + R.S.A.G.
• Delush
• Child of Prague
• The Donnys
• Grá
• Fierce Fire & Pole Troupe
• DJ Dandelion
• Regina & The Queens
• Calum Agnew
• Lucy McWilliams
• Dose
• Jean Pack
• Rua Rí
• Malaki
• Crayfish
• Groev
• Madams Last Discovery
• The Year Grunge Broke
• Leevy
• Tony St Ledger
• Dear Willow
• Olivia Is A Ghost
• 7LZ
• Dirty Circus

Jerry Fish, the alter ego of musician Gerard Whelan (also of An Emotional Fish and Jerry Fish & The Mudbug Club), has built Fish Town into one of Electric Picnic’s most consistent late-night draws, an eclectic, theatrical space built around his long-running motto of “unity through diversity.”

Everything on lineup, timings, tickets, access and accreditation for the sixth annual concert series at Collins Barracks, running Tuesday August 25th to Sunday August 30th.

Wider Than Pictures returns to the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks for its fifth year, running six nights from Tuesday August 25th to Sunday August 30th.

Who’s playing

• Tuesday August 25th (Night 1) – Amyl and the Sniffers, with special guests Mannequin Pussy + Spider (sold out)
• Wednesday August 26th (Night 2) – Amyl and the Sniffers, with special guests Mannequin Pussy + Spider
• Thursday August 27th – Faye Webster, with special guests SPRINTS + Amie Blu
• Friday August 28th – berlioz presents deep in it, with special guests Sofia Kourtesis + Ricky Chong
• Saturday August 29th – Mac DeMarco, with special guest Tex Crick (sold out)
• Sunday August 30th – Super Furry Animals, with special guests Baxter Dury + Really Good Time.

Where and how to get there

Collins Barracks sits between the River Liffey, the Phoenix Park, and the Smithfield and Stoneybatter neighbourhoods, entry via Liffey Street West. The Museum LUAS stop is right outside, and it’s also served by multiple bus routes. There’s no parking at the venue, so public transport is the way to go.

Stage and event times

Exact stage times will be confirmed closer to each show, but the general schedule is:

• Doors: 6pm
• Start: 7pm
• Curfew: 10:30pm

Food and drink

Draft stout, beer and ale come from independent craft brewery River Rye, alongside spirits, wine and non-alcoholic options.

Sustainability

A Cup Return Scheme runs across all shows, a €3 deposit applies per reusable cup, refunded at designated return windows at the bar at the end of the night. Card refunds go back to the original payment card, so bring it with you; cash refunds are available with a receipt.

Tickets

On sale now via singularartists.ie and ticketmaster.ie. Night one of Amyl & The Sniffers (Tuesday 25th) and Mac DeMarco (Saturday 29th) are sold out. Tickets are on sale now via singularartists.ie and ticketmaster.ie.

Age requirements

Have your digital ticket downloaded and ready to scan.

• Amyl & The Sniffers shows: strictly over 18s
• Mac DeMarco: strictly over 16s (under 18s must be accompanied by an adult)
• berlioz presents deep in it: strictly over 16s (under 18s must be accompanied by an adult)

Accessibility

All shows are fully standing on tarmac. An accessible viewing platform has limited availability, and all accessible tickets are now sold out. Accessible toilets and ramps are available on site for all ticket holders.

Prohibited items

Fireworks, Chinese lanterns, flares and high-power torches; alcohol, drugs or illegal substances; animals (except guide dogs); anything considered an offensive weapon; laser pens; professional photographic equipment (detachable lenses and/or drones); selfie sticks; umbrellas; high-vis clothing; bicycles; bags larger than A4; aerosols; audio recorders; air horns; cans; camping equipment; drones; food and drink; garden furniture, deckchairs, fold-up chairs or shooting sticks; glass; GoPros; large chains, spiked bracelets or wallet chains; megaphones; nitrous oxide; portable laser equipment; smoke canisters; sound systems; spray cans.

Anything else

Wider Than Pictures is partnering with Hygiene Hub this year, a Dublin charity tackling hygiene poverty. Guest list ticket holders will be invited to donate €10 per ticket to the charity.

The Dreams are Ours to Keep marks two years since the passing of Eoin French, while the Cork festival also announces the SFSH25 Mixtape LP and a European and UK tour for its SIRENS collective.

Sounds from a Safe Harbour has released The Dreams are Ours to Keep, a short film marking two years since the death of Eoin French (Talos), one of Ireland’s most loved musicians and a founding force behind the festival.

The film looks back at the residency at the heart of SFSH’s 2023 edition, and specifically the making of ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’, written during that residency by Ólafur Arnalds, Talos, Niamh Regan and Ye Vagabonds. The song was first performed in the lobby of The River Lee before travelling to the festival finale at Cork Opera House, hosted by Ye Vagabonds, and later to the Tommy Tiernan Show, then recorded for the album A Dawning.

It’s shot by Peadar O’Goill with Steve O’Connor, Sean Phair and Adrian O’Connell, and edited by Louise Gaffney, with words by Max Porter (read by Niamh Regan) running through it, written after his first experience of the residency, an experience that led him to join SFSH as a core curator.

 “At the time, we didn’t know how precious that week would become, or how little time we would have with Eoin. The song was written about the experience of creating together – about being present in that moment, in that room, with those people – but since Eoin’s passing, the words have taken on a new depth of meaning. It’s a reminder of the extraordinary comfort music can bring us, and of the lasting connection created through moments of shared creativity.” 

Festival Director Mary Hickson

French worked on SFSH from its inception and designed the graphics for the 2023 edition. The Dreams are Ours to Keep is dedicated to his memory, and is out now on YouTube.

SFSH25 Mixtape

The festival is also releasing its first-ever vinyl record, SFSH25 Mixtape, out Friday September 25th. The single LP captures highlights from MIXTAPE, the sold-out orchestral performance staged at SFSH25, featuring Jon Hopkins, The Staves, Amanda Bergman, Sam Amidon, Sean Carey, Leif Vollebekk and Angie McMahon performing with the Cork Opera House Concert Orchestra and SFSH Choir, conducted by Cormac McCarthy.

It’s available for pre-order on Anthem Vinyl.

Tracklist

Side A

1. Jon Hopkins — Feel First Life (arranged by Bryce Dessner, co arranged by Michael Blasky)

2. The Staves — Damn It All (arranged by Áine Delaney)

2. Amanda Bergman — Wild Geese, Wild Love (arranged by Bryce Dessner, co arranged by Michael Blasky; additional guitar, Bryce Dessner and Petter Winnberg)

4. Sam Amidon — Three Five (arranged by Bryce Dessner, co arranged by Michael Blasky; additional guitar, Bryce Dessner)

Side B

1. Áine Delaney — Make it Still

2. Sean Carey — Alpenglow (arrangement by. Áine Delaney; featuring Michael Lewis on saxophone)

3. Leif Vollebekk — Sunset Boulevard Expedition (arrangement by Áine Delaney, Chris Elliot & Leif Vollebekk)

4. Angie McMahon — Serotonin (arrangement by Bryce Dessner, co arranged by Michael Blasky; additional guitar, Bryce Dessner)

SIRENS tour

SFSH is also sending SIRENS out on the road this autumn, an evolving ensemble hosted by Lisa Hannigan with the Theodora Byrne Trio, developed during the SFSH25 residency. Irish dates were previously announced, but UK and European ones were added.

SIRENS 2026 dates:

• 24th September 2026 – Inis Oírr Island *SOLD OUT* 
• 26th September 2026 – National Concert Hall, Dublin 
• 27th September 2026 – Cork Opera House, Cork City 
• 10^th October 2026 – Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff 
• 11th October 2026 – PEOPLE Festival, Berlin  
• 17th October 2026 – The Barbican, London 
• 18^th October 2026 – Teatro Principal, San Sebastián 

The Berlin date falls within PEOPLE Festival, which opens Funkhaus to the public for two days of roughly 200 unscripted performances across its rooms and stages, with no published lineup, you find out who’s playing once you’re in the room. The San Sebastián date is part of AB100, a weekend built around Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s wider musical community, marking the brothers’ 50th birthdays, and also featuring Kevin Morby, Ben Howard, Jon Hopkins, Ragnar Kjartansson, Richard Reed Parry, Ye Vagabonds and more, closing with a rare performance from The National.

Sounds from a Safe Harbour returns to Cork for its next full festival edition from Wednesday September 30th to Sunday October 3rd 2027.

Phoebe Bridgers to debut Lost Weekend inside planetariums worldwide ahead of album release next week.

Screenings run from Monday August 10th through the album’s release on Friday August 14th, paired with visuals from National Geographic photographer Babak Tafreshi or Laser Fantasy, alongside over 300 midnight listening parties.

Each session pairs the album with one of two original visual accompaniments: a custom dome show from night-sky photographer Babak Tafreshi, filmed across nearly 20 countries with no CGI, taking in Madagascar’s skies, Iceland’s Northern Lights and storms over Texas; or an immersive laser show from longtime planetarium visual outfit Laser Fantasy. The sessions are phone and camera free, with devices secured in Yondr pouches for the duration.

Participating planetariums span the US, Canada, Europe, the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand, including Armagh Observatory and Planetarium which recently hosted this Music for Domes project featuring music from Róis. That screening is August 11th and tickets are here (3 timed events but all seem sold out already).

Full listings and ticket details are available at planetariumexperience.phoebebridgers.com.

Midnight listening parties also

Bridgers and Spotify are also hosting an over 300 midnight listening parties are scheduled worldwide for Thursday August 13th, including events across the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland and much of Europe, Asia, Australasia and Latin America but there is no Irish date. Details are available at phoebebridgers.lnk.to/midnight-parties.

Lost Weekend is Bridgers’ third solo album, and follows lead single ‘Lost Boys’, out now.

The number of planetarium showings and available tickets vary per venue. Participating planetariums are:

USA & Canada:
Boston, MA  – Museum of Science 
Bozeman, MT- Museum of the Rockies – Taylor Planetarium
Bridgeport, CT – SHU Discovery Science Center and Planetarium 
Chicago, IL – Adler Planetarium
Columbus, OH – COSI Planetarium
Costa Mesa, CA – Orange Coast College Planetarium 
Dayton, OH – Boonshoft Museum of Discovery
Des Moines, IA – Science Center of Iowa – Star Theater Planetarium
Detroit, MI – Michigan Science Center
Eugene, OR – Eugene Science Center
Fort Worth, Texas – Jane & John Justin Foundation Omni Theater
Grand Rapids, MI – Chaffe Planetarium
Jersey City, NJ  – Liberty Science Center 
Kansas City, MO – Union Station
Laramie, WY  – UW Physics & Astronomy
Las Vegas, Nevada – CSN Planetarium 
Miami, Florida – Phillip & Patricia Frost Museum of Science 
Nashville, TN – Sudekum Planetarium
Newport News VA – Virginia Living Museum 
Orono, Maine – Versant Power Astronomy Center & Jordan Planetarium
Peoria IL – Peoria Riverfront Museum – Dome Planetarium
Phoenix, AZ – Arizona Science Center – Dorrance DOME
Pleasant Grove, UT – Christa McAuliffe Space Center 
Richmond, VA – Science Museum of Virginia – The Dome
Rochester, NY  – RMSC 
Rowan NJ -Edelman Planetarium
Sacramento, CA – Museum of Science and Curiosity  
Salt Lake City, Utah –  Clark Planetarium
San Francisco, CA – Morrison Planetarium
Seattle WA – PacSci
Spruce Pine, NC – Earth to Sky Park
Tallahassee FL – Challenger Learning Center of Tallahassee FL   
Tucson AZ – Flandrau Science Center
Vancouver, Canada – The H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Wichita KS – Exploration Place

Europe:
Luzern, Switzerland – Verkehrshaus der Schweiz
Paris, France – Planétarium de la Cité des sciences et de l’industrie

UK & Ireland:
Armagh, N. Ireland – Armagh Observatory and Planetarium
Glasgow, Scotland – Glasgow Science Center

Australia & New Zealand:
Auckland, New Zealand – Te Whatu Stardome
Dunedin, NZ – Tūhura Planetarium
Melbourne, AUS – Scienceworks – Melbourne Planetarium
Wellington, NZ – Space Place
Wollongong, NSW –  UOW Space Space

The festival’s wellness and music village welcomes traditional heavyweights alongside Máirtín O’Connor, Zoe Conway, Eleanor McEvoy, John Francis Flynn and Denise Chaila, plus a full programme of yoga, sound baths and workshops.

Electric Picnic has announced the music lineup for Croí, the festival’s dedicated space for movement, meditation and mindfulness. Donal Lunny, Máirtín O’Connor and Zoe Conway play together, alongside sets from Eleanor McEvoy, John Francis Flynn, Denise Chaila, Huartan, Kean Kavanagh, Felispeaks, Melina Malone, Shampain, Rory Sweeney, Inni-K and the UCD Gamelan Orchestra, The Leon Stax Equation and more, across a natural amphitheatre built around a green stage constructed from fallen trees. Daytime sets rooted in folk and traditional music give way to more electronic and theatrical performances after dark.

Cruit Éireann | Harp Ireland also returns with three days of harpists and harp ensembles in the expanded Serenity Garden, running on its own dedicated daytime stage. The Trad Tent is back too, with Áine O’Brien and The Kilfenora Roadshow leading traditional sessions from 6pm to midnight.

Beyond the music, Croí splits into four dedicated wellness spaces for the weekend. Crescent Earth focuses on movement through dance, yoga and fitness. Realign covers restorative yoga, breathwork, meditation, sound baths and cacao ceremonies. Kinship & Touch runs workshops on connection, relationships and somatic practice. Intinn hosts talks and discussions on psychology, mental health and creativity.

Practitioners across the weekend include Yoga with Maura, Allan Muller and Aligned with Amber Doyle, among others.

Electric Picnic takes place at Stradbally Hall, Co. Laois, from Friday August 28th to Sunday August 30th 2026, and is sold out.

My recommended best long playing albums and records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.

Kelela – new avatar

The long-awaited third album from Kelela, her first full-length since 2023’s Raven. Kelela is one of the most singular voices in contemporary R&B, threading club-adjacent production, ambient patience and emotionally direct writing through a body of work that has become steadily more essential with each release.

new avatar is another top tier album from one of the great modern voices – this time pairing iced-cool synths with minimal beats and lots of grungy guitar texture – creating a whole new shoegaze R&B sound (with elements of witch house even? – Burial is getting mentions too), for that voice to do its significant business.

In case you haven’t guessed, Kelela possesses one of my favourite voices and new avatar is no different in terms of the quality she has displayed since the 2013 Cut 4 Me mixtape.

AK Paul features on ‘outta time’,bringing another distinct sound world – The Paul Institute to this character’s orbit, Foushée guests on ‘new life forms’ and Pinkpantheress features on The Bridge’.

Swapmeet – Mount Zero

A new album from South Australian band Swapmeet, working in a scuzzy guitar-forward alt-rock slowcore register. Mount Zero is a strong pickup for anyone into the melodic fuzz end of the rock.

This is the band’s second album after their 2024 debut EP, released on LA-based label Winspear. In the spirit of their name, each band member traded instruments throughout with common themes throughout: first loves, first heartbreaks, first embarrassments, first disasters.

Playing Dublin in November too.

Four Tet (00000ooooo) – Symbols side-project

A surprise new album from Kieran Hebden on his 00000ooooo Bandcamp, the symbols alias he has used across the years for a small, cherished corner of his prolific catalogue. Hebden’s Bandcamp-only releases under this alias have leaned toward the more experimental, patient and ambient-adjacent end of his practice, and the new record continues that thread. A properly stealth-drop Friday release from one of the artists whose next move has always been worth stopping to check on. All very familiar Four Tet noise – twinkling bells, beats, bass and split between starry-eyed and propulsive production. A couple of the tracks are either previously released or new versions of previous KH songs like ‘Feelings’ which is track five on this.

Listen on Bandcamp.

Mad Professor – Melodies International presents Ariwa Sounds

Ariwa, Mad Professor’s label and reggae studio in South London has been running since 1979 and has released over 300 albums in reggae, dub, and Lovers Rock since.

This 15-track compilation released on Melodies International  draws from 45 years of recordings on the Ariwa label with tracks from Johnny Clarke, Sandra Cross, Kofi, U Roy, Sister Nancy, Queen Omega, Aisha, Garnett Cross, Abel Miller, Horace Andy. It’s a beaut.

Mallory Hawk – Chinook

The debut solo album from Mallory Hawk, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter (born Hawkins, the surname clipped to summon a bird of prey), and Stereogum’s album of the week. Chinook takes its name from the twin-rotor military helicopters that filled the skies over her childhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and turns them into a metaphor for a habit of caring for everyone around her at her own expense.

The music refuses to sit still, moving from noisy indie to dance-punk, folk, garage-punk, new wave and swaying country rock across its 10 songs, held together by Hawk’s weary, big-hearted writing.

Irish listeners may know her as a former touring bassist for Dublin’s M(h)aol; she has also fronted Brooklyn post-punks Customer, played in Trace Mountains, and co-ran the indie-pop label Double Double Whammy.

The Strokes – Reality Awaits

The seventh album from The Strokes, and their first since 2020’s winning The New Abnormal. Twenty-five years on from Is This It, Julian Casablancas and co. occupy an unusual position: a band whose debut is permanently lodged in the canon, still capable of surprising people when they choose to. The gaps between records have grown long enough that each new one arrives as an event in itself. 

Reality Awaits, perhaps because of the gap, and the band’s recent return via Coachella which seems to have increased their cultural cachet, finds the band in a slightly new reality – their old tight rock style is evident in the album’s DNA, it’s just pitched differently – brighter lighter – and doesn’t stray too far from the sonic sound of the last one – there’s a Phoenix-esque jam on ‘Lonely In The Future’, the soft neon rock of ‘Dine’n’Dash’, Julian Casablancas’ vocal auto-tune as deliberate effect on ‘Psycho Shit’, ‘Going Shopping’ and ‘Falling Out of Love’ and classic rock on ‘The Fruits Of Conquest’. That makes sense The Strokes are the most palpable classic rock bands we’ve got.

WILLOW – THE THREAD

The new album from WILLOW whose explored alternative music for years now – moving between pop-punk, neo-soul, jazz-adjacent art-rock and back again. Each WILLOW record has landed somewhere different from the last, and THE THREAD arrives with that same unpredictability baked in – WILLOW is an artist of interest – always intriguing.

Lido Pimienta – Caribenya

“What if Enya went to the Caribbean and partied with my Black and brown friends, what would happen? How can I create a record that goes Enya-mode and doesn’t care about trends or fashion, or that doesn’t care about how I look?”

That’s how Colombian-Canadian artist Lido Pimienta pitched her new album Caribenya to The Guardian last week. Intriguing!

Caribenya is follow-up to 2020’s Polaris-nominated Miss Colombia (she won for her album La Papessa in 2017). Pimienta makes vivid, politically charged art-pop rooted in Afro-Colombian and Indigenous musical traditions, and her records are among the most singular in the wider Latin-alternative world.

Charli xcx – Music, Fashion, Film

The follow-up to Brat, and by any measure the most-watched pop release of the year. Charli spent 2024 turning a lime-green square into a cultural event, then spent the time since refusing to simply repeat it. Music, Fashion, Film arrives led by ‘Camera’, with an Aidan Zamiri-directed video starring Vincent Cassel, and the title alone signals an artist thinking well beyond the record as a format.

Music, Fashion, Film is an inevitable comedown sonically but not much has changed in Charli’s brain – even during BRAT she was questioning herself, her insecurities and her place in the world. This time around, there are lots of big names attached to the project – David Cronenberg offers advice on the closing track ‘No One Last Forever’, and the triumvirate of John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese are on the cover.

As promised there is a lot of “rock music”, mostly in the form of sharpened guitar tones alongside some more PC Music-style synth textures like on the commerce galaxy brain of ‘Card Declined’, the guitar through effects on ‘Camera’, the muted emo-pop-punk of ‘2007’, and the frazzled fuzz of ‘I’m Afraid’ , ‘Magic Metal Montana’ is an ode to AG Cook built on a Strokes-esque lollop, and the pop punk returns on ‘Yeah’. It sounds like a musical exorcism of the BRAT era, an album operating on unstable ground, spilling out over the edges in an honest fashion. The album she had to make? Probably.

Body Type – Tally

The Sydney four-piece Body Type, whose scratchy, melodic guitar records sit in the lineage of Australian indie that runs through The Go-Betweens and out the other side. ‘And What Else?’ which kicks off the record caught my ear a few months ago.

Body Type releasing on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s p(doom) records and are Sophie McComish, Annabel Blackman, Cecil Coleman, and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums.

Baby Rose – YEARNALISM

The Washington DC Atlanta-based singer has one of the most arresting voices in contemporary R&B – deep, weathered, the definition of a proper soul voice – her 2024 EP collaboration with BadBadNotGood was a hit around these parts.

The new album YEARNALISM is a follow-up to 2023’s much-loved Through and Through. Rose’s voice is one of the most immediately recognisable in contemporary soul, deep and unhurried, and her writing has consistently paired that instrument with real emotional weight. One of the more warmly anticipated soul records of the summer.

What albums are you enjoying? Join our Discord community with a Patreon membership and discuss albums with us.

The Kilkenny-born, Dublin-raised singer Cat Dowling died on Friday August 7th after a long illness at the age of 54.

Dowling first emerged fronting Babelfish, the band that became Alphastates who were one of the most singular Irish groups of the noughties, whose Made From Sand arrived in 2004 and Human Nature in 2009 before they split the following year. The band had electro pop and trip-hop influences which was rare for an Irish band of that time.

Cat Dowling solo career began properly with The Believer in 2013, an album we premiered here in May of that year. Writing about it at the time, I said she sounded “revitalised and focused” — that unbound from a band, “Dowling’s lone creative vision works much better.” She put the new writing down to becoming a mother: motherhood was primal and grounding, she said, and you no longer messed around with time.

The record traded Alphastates’ electronic production for guitar, piano and violin, with Karl Odlum and former Alphastates man Gerry Horan producing – I was a big supporter of the album, posting ‘Come On’ a couple of months earlier, and followed with the videos for ‘Somebody Else’ and ‘The Believer’.

The album led with Dowling’s authorative and expressive voice.

The title track found a second life through a sync placement on the US TV series Banshee and The Witches of East End, while ‘Somebody Else’ turned up in the Irish film My Name Is Emily, the kind of sync that kept an independent Irish artist’s catalogue landing far beyond home. She returned in 2021 with the album Animals produced by Horan with Dowling co-producing, which we covered at the time.

She kept working through illness. Her reading of The Pogues’ ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ became the soundtrack to the Department of Foreign Affairs’ St Patrick’s Day campaign, and she appeared at the Dublin launch of Rock Against Homelessness in aid of Focus Ireland in January, and recent collaborations with Peter Vogelaar placed her voice in a vocal electronic context once more.

In June she posted that she had a lot of new material she hoped to record this year. “It’s the longest day with the greatest amount of light. Light aways overcomes darkness no matter how dark this world gets painted at times. Let’s keep shining and spreading our light. I have so much new material and I really hope I can get to record it this year. Art conquers the divide. We need more coming together. Always keep her lit my friends.”

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Tributes were paid to her by Jerry Fish who said “Cat was a warrior for love, a gentle soul, humble and generous to a fault. We will miss her Punk heart and rasping angel of a voice.”

Whelan’s paid tribute to the songwriter, saying “another great talent lost from Dublin’s music family.”

Condolences to her family and friends. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

Rest in power Cat.

The funeral will take place tomorrow Tuesday August 11th – reposing at Power’s in Ferrybank tomorrow from 2.30pm, requiem mass Wednesday at 1pm in the Sacred Heart Church, burial at Glenmore.

A live recording from The Big Romance about a 2008 Sub Pop-released classic album of the 2000s.

Step into a world of misty melodies and cavernous echoes with Seattle band Fleet Foxes’ landmark debut – a defining record of the late-2000s indie folk revival. Led by Robin Pecknold, the album blends the lush, pastoral harmonies of the 1960s with a haunting baroque-pop sensibility and lyrical themes rooted in nature, tradition, and introspection. Like the Bruegel painting on its cover, every track reveals a dense, beautiful world that evokes a timeless – almost mythic Americana sound.

This podcast episode is a live recording from our listening party in The Big Romance in April, with guest journalist and Fleet Foxes fan Aoife Barry.

Our next Listening Party is Smashing Pumpkins later this month and it’s sold out.

Listen Closely: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (2008)

A Nialler9 listening party, hosted by Niall Byrne with guest Aoife Barry.

Before the album

Niall: Hello everyone, how are you? Welcome to the Listen Closely album listening party. I’m Niall, and this is Aoife Barry.

Aoife: Hello.

Niall: We’re here tonight because Aoife picked this album, as she has before. You picked Jeff Buckley last year.

Aoife: Yeah, and we ended up doing three of them.

Niall: We did, we went to Cork. We did two here and then we went to Cork to talk about Jeff Buckley. And you were at the My Bloody Valentine listening party last year as well, back in October.

Aoife: It must have been October, yeah.

Niall: Well, obviously we’re here for a very different album tonight: Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes, from 2008. As you heard there, we played a bit of the Sun Giant EP by the band, which came out a few months before this album, because we want to give the album its full due. They’re a little different, and we’ll talk about that. But yeah, you picked the record.

Aoife: I did. I obviously must like it. And it’s such an incredible record. Is there anybody here who hasn’t heard it? That’s really exciting, if so. I’m excited for you to hear it. You got a sneak peek there of what the vibe is going to be.

I picked it because I love this record, but I also had a funny story about how I first heard them. Back in 2008, when this record came out, I’d read about this band called Fleet Foxes in a music magazine. I don’t even think I’d heard a song yet, this is back in the day. And I was on holidays in Berlin, and in the tiny little hostel we were staying in, they had a sign up on the wall: “Who’s playing tonight? Fleet Foxes, Café Zapata.” I said to my boyfriend, “I think that’s a band I read about in the magazine, will we go see them?” And he was like, “Grand.” So we went, and they were unbelievable. It was so good. Beach House were supporting them. So it was 2008 smacking you in the face.

Niall: Come on.

Aoife: And I took photos, which I found. I have photos. Artifacts. One is terrible, the other one’s not so terrible, taken on one of those little Canon digital cameras. And I still have the ticket, I kept the ticket, I’m one of those hoarders who keeps all their gig tickets. But it was so good: the venue they played in had a dragon that breathed fire out every fifteen minutes.

Niall: So they’d be playing and this dragon…

Aoife: I’m not even exaggerating. Fire would just shoot out of this mechanical dragon. It was so Berlin. And Fleet Foxes were so stunning, and Beach House were so stunning. I love Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, I love all those harmony vibes, I wish I was born in the seventies, sadly I was not. So I fell in love with them immediately, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Although I’ll say I probably dipped a little bit around the Crack-Up era, their third album, but then I saw them when Shore came out, their most recent album, and fell right back in love with them.

Niall: We’re going to talk about all the albums that come afterwards, but we’ll start with this one, because this is presumably your favourite, or one of them.

Aoife: Shore is up there as well for me, but yeah.

Niall: So what was it about Fleet Foxes at the time? For context: in 2008 there was quite a lot of this kind of music around. We previously did Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago as a listening party, and the funny thing, which I only found out when we did this, is that they have the same origin story in a way. Both songwriters went to a cabin in the woods to pour their heart out and write the songs.

Aoife: I think Justin Vernon just got there first in terms of the marketing.

Niall: So they must have pulled back on talking about it too much, because it’s basically the same thing. They never really talked about Robin Pecknold’s writing process in those terms.

Aoife: For Emma was such a massive moment, everybody was obsessed with this guy who broke up with a girl and went to a cabin and wrote a record about it. It was the ur indie-folk album.

Niall: What was really appealing about Fleet Foxes is that they were so young, between about twenty-two and twenty-seven, and Robin Pecknold was twenty-one when he wrote the record. Which is frankly offensive, you shouldn’t be allowed to be so talented at twenty-one.

Aoife: I know. And they were clearly these people from Seattle, which we associate with grunge, and then it becomes this place where they’re bringing out all the pastoral, outdoorsy, mountain-and-sea vibes of the Washington area. They’re obviously really influenced by the seventies too, by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, by Laurel Canyon, but also by Appalachian folk. There’s a real purity to what they’re doing. The harmonies are unbelievable, there’s even a bit of a gospel feeling. So these young guys made this album that was being called an iconic American record on release. The Guardian called it a landmark American album, something like that. And that’s special, because you don’t get that many records immediately being called landmark.

Niall: It was a very exciting time for music around then. I actually brought some records. We mentioned Beach House and Teen Dream earlier, that’s a bit later, 2010. I wanted to do a listening party for that at some point, that’d be good craic. Around that time you had Animal Collective and Panda Bear, Person Pitch was right there, that was the apex for that very experimental scene. A few years later we had Sufjan, our very first listening party. And Bon Iver, of course. There’s also stuff like Neutral Milk Hotel very much of that vibe.

Aoife: I’ve noticed people covering Neutral Milk Hotel more now.

Niall: I think when we got to it, it was on its second go-round, and now it’s getting a third, which is great. It’s a great record. So, the band were from Seattle, they had a bit of the scruffy flannel-shirt look, but obviously didn’t sound like that. The album was written in the woods, in the cabin, brought to the band, and recorded with Phil Ek.

Aoife: Who did a lot of stuff with Built to Spill.

Niall: Yeah, and he worked with The Shins, and Modest Mouse, a really long history.

Aoife: Are The Shins from Seattle as well?

Niall: I think they might be. Band of Horses is another one. So they recorded it themselves with Phil Ek, paid for it all themselves, and then the local major independent label Sub Pop came calling. Obviously known for a lot of grunge traditionally, but they’d clearly been releasing this kind of music around then too, The Shins had been on the label for a few years, Band of Horses. When it came to it, they signed to Sub Pop. Apparently there was a bidding war.

Aoife: They’d become quite popular on MySpace. Anybody remember MySpace? Every time I do one of these I feel older and older, mentioning the top eight, the randomers you’d put in your top eight. Word could spread quite quickly once you got popular on MySpace.

Niall: What I thought was really interesting, that I discovered when I was researching, is that recording the album was actually a total pain for them. They didn’t have much money, so they ended up recording a lot of it in their houses, or in Robin Pecknold’s family home. And he re-did all the vocals right before they mastered the record, because he’d been sick during the initial sessions and his voice wasn’t in great shape. They recorded it all in one go, scrapped that, did another version, and kept moving the running order around. I’m always fascinated by albums where the creation was a total pain and they had no idea it would even work out. Robin Pecknold actually said, “I hope nobody cares about this album, because I just want to move on to the next one.” And then it becomes this iconic record.

Aoife: Isn’t every artist sick of their album by the time it’s done? You’re like, “my paintings.” Yeah.

Niall: 2008 was an interesting time for it to land. The album draws on the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nick Drake, Simon & Garfunkel, Fairport Convention, Judee Sill, very much old-timey or sixties folk and pastoral stuff. And in 2008 there’s a financial crash. The album was worked on before that, but it was released into that environment, and a lot of this music seemed to catch. When things go bad, we retreat, we dream, we listen to music that’s maybe the opposite of what we’re feeling. There was a gentleness, an unhurriedness to it that resonated.

Aoife: Grizzly Bear is another band from that time. When Jay-Z and Beyoncé went to see Grizzly Bear in Brooklyn, that was kind of where all the indie music peaked.

Niall: And the other part of it, which I was involved in, was the MP3 blogs, that’s where you’d hear this music. Especially the American and Canadian stuff, no one was promoting it over here yet, so you’d be months ahead. You’d hear Fleet Foxes in these MP3 formats. That was a mad period, it showed how the internet could collapse geography, a song could spread really quickly on the blogs.

And in an American context, this came out post-Bush, with the Obama era coming in, a more hopeful tone. You had the Lehman Brothers crash, these global pressures, and then these hopeful times too. It’s interesting to wonder whether these albums are a reaction to it, or whether they appeal to us because we want nice, happy things. I feel like Fleet Foxes have so much emotional depth: there’s yearning, sadness, hope, nostalgia.

Aoife: I loved Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, their first record, a complex, complicated, almost jazzy thing that sounded beautiful but had a lot going on. We weren’t going for simplistic music, but we wanted music that gave us depth and beauty. Is art a solution to the world collapsing?

Niall: We could be answering that in 2026. We live in a cursed timeline, as I keep saying. That’s all I’m going to say. But what else happened in 2008 in the wider circle of music? Portishead returned with Third. TV on the Radio released Dear Science. MGMT released Oracular Spectacular, ‘Kids’ and all that. Cut Copy released In Ghost Colours, Indie Sleaze night on Saturday, folks, come on. Kanye put out 808s & Heartbreak, that was November that year. Rihanna was at the peak of her powers.

Aoife: Katy Perry appeared that year. And ‘American Boy’.

Niall: ‘American Boy’, still one of the best pop songs, fire. Iron & Wine was the other one I forgot to mention. So it was a really vibrant, varied year. As you heard, there’s the Sun Giant EP too.

Aoife: The thing about that is it came out before the album, but was recorded after. The album was done, in the bag.

Niall: They decided to go into the studio and record Sun Giant, a collection of songs intended to sell on tour. It ended up being quite popular, and for a lot of people it was their first time discovering Fleet Foxes.

Aoife: It wasn’t like The Coronas’ ‘San Diego Song’, their summer-holiday anthem, or anything like that. But it came out before the album, and then the album arrives.

Niall: So what was the reaction at the time? Was it immediate?

Aoife: Things happened really quickly. In January that year they got all the MySpace attention, and by June the album was coming out. Really, really quick. There was so much chatter about them, which is partly why I’d seen the name, and a music blog like yours would have seen it too, and known they were one of the big bands. In a way that’s harder now.

Niall: These days you see bands like Geese getting a lot of attention because they use companies that help them go viral. You didn’t really have that then. Now you’d dress yourself up in some gimmick, polka dots, whatever, and go viral all over the internet for it. I couldn’t imagine these lads doing that.

Aoife: No. But maybe in a way they were cosplaying living in the forest, on the Puget Sound.

Niall: Anyway, when the album came out, people loved them, and it really hit it off. Because they sound so seventies, your parents would love the records and you’d love the records. There’s almost a lullaby quality to the folk stuff too. The music is applicable to anybody of any generation, and there’s something lovely about nostalgic music that reminds you of a better time.

To finish on that point: I think there’s something very mysterious about Fleet Foxes, they feel out of time. They’re these young, scruffy lads with the beards, but there’s a mystery to them. They didn’t come across as the hipster end of things, they weren’t leaning into anything. They were presented as the kind of band that wouldn’t have had phones, would have lived off-grid, which is funny because they were a MySpace band. They’re the most un-MySpace band you can imagine. Surprise people, do something a bit different, don’t be exactly what people want you to be, and they’ll love you for it. And then your songs are unbelievable too, soaring and stunning.

Can we talk for a second about the cover? It’s an original painting from 1559 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs. It depicts a densely populated Flemish village scene illustrating 126 folk proverbs. There’s a lot there. Some on this side are cut off, but for example, this woman here, she’s putting the blue cloak on her husband, meaning she deceives him. This guy is casting roses before swine, wasting effort on the unworthy. And right at the top there’s a man running through a field with his arse on fire, chasing pigs, “he who eats fire craps sparks,” do not be surprised at the outcome if you attempt a dangerous venture. There are 126 of those.

Aoife: The interesting thing is that the band managed to get permission to use it. Really unusual to be allowed use it as commercial artwork.

Niall: And apparently the museum that holds the artwork were delighted. A lot of stars aligned for them. It’s an iconic cover because it’s so different from what anybody else was doing, clearly of a particular period, and it has that Where’s Wally quality. I have a quote about it. Robin said: “We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do, and my brother had been working some stuff out, when I saw this Bruegel painting in a book my girlfriend had. I liked that it had a really intriguing meaning, there’s a story to each little scene, which felt fitting for the record. It was dense but unified, not a collage. It has a Where’s Waldo quality, something you could look at for a long time on a vinyl sleeve and keep finding new little things. It was very easy to get the museum in Berlin that has it to say yes, they were super excited the band wanted to use it, and put it in their newsletter. When you open it up, on the inside there’s a Paisley pattern traced from the back of a book that Skyler’s mum got me. We wanted two very different feelings.”

So, what to look out for when we press play very shortly?

Aoife: When I was going back to this, I had it in my head that every song was one of these big songs, because there are so many big moments. But actually there are two tracks that are pretty much acoustic, so it’s interesting to notice how they go from the big sound to the small. And for me they’re a real emotion-and-feeling band, so notice how you feel listening to it. I always feel this swell of emotion with Fleet Foxes, I was walking down the road listening to Shore and I was like, my God. So lean back and feel into the emotions they’re bringing you. And listen to the lyrics if you can make them out, because they’re so out of time, all about pack horses and this amazing imagery. Robin Pecknold said he didn’t write about a lot of personal stuff because he didn’t have enough life experience yet, so instead he wrote these beautifully poetic narratives about pastoral and rural life. So I’d say the lyrics and the feelings are the two things.

Niall: Track two, ‘White Winter Hymnal’, is probably the biggest one, watch out for that. And a few other people thanked and cited as influences, for some extra context: Brian Wilson, Joanna Newsom, Bob Dylan, Noah Lennox and all the lads from Animal Collective, Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson of The Band, Blitzen Trapper, who they toured with at the time and who were bigger than them then. For some reason Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are listed together, which is fair enough. Marvin Gaye, Damien Jurado, Paul Simon and John Lennon listed together. Townes Van Zandt, a legend. Vashti Bunyan, and Van Morrison.

There’s a nice quote from Robin Pecknold I’ll read afterwards. Let’s just open it up and listen. I’ll play it at full volume, it’s about thirty-nine minutes, two sides. Close your eyes, whatever you want to do, vibe away in your own way.

[The album plays: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes, 39 minutes.]

After the album

Niall: It’s quite an economical album, isn’t it? It doesn’t stick around long, thirty-nine minutes.

Aoife: I like an economical album. It’s also one of the first fairly short records we’ve done here.

Niall: That’s part of why I was thinking about Sun Giant in that context too. I’m going to read a bit from the liner notes, because for an album that’s very much about feelings, with only a few direct songs, some of what’s written here is interesting:

“My first memory has always been of me and my mom on a cold grey day down at some beach in Washington, along the Puget Sound somewhere near Seattle. I would be around two or three years old, and we were with a friend of mine from the neighbourhood and his mom, walking among the driftwood looking for crabs. Even now I can remember the smell and temperature of the air, the feeling of the sand and the swaying tall grass. I can even remember looking over at my friend and how his face looked when he smiled back at me.

Another memory I’ll sometimes recall as my first is dressing up in the dead of summer as Jack London, with tennis rackets on my feet and wearing my dad’s hiking pack, after seeing Disney’s terrible version of White Fang. Or the memory of stealing my neighbour’s Big Wheel and riding it halfway down the block before getting caught and having to turn around defeated. Or wearing a fireman’s outfit while washing my parents’ car, or eating an orange popsicle from the ice cream truck. These have always been some of my most distinct and persistent memories of childhood.

So it came as a disappointment when, one day as a teenager, I opened up a photo album and found pictures of each and every one of these memories. I didn’t have a single memory that didn’t belong to, or somehow grow from, those pictures my parents had. I guess I’ve seen all these photographs at some point, forgotten they were just photographs, and over time made them into my most tangible memories. That’s scary to me in a way.

This leads me to something weird about the power music has: its transportability. Any time I hear a song or record that meant a lot to me at a certain moment, I’m instantly taken back to that place in full detail. Whenever I hear ‘Feel Flows’ by the Beach Boys, I’m taken straight to the back of my parents’ car on the way to my grandparents’ place, with Surf’s Up in my Walkman and the Cascade Mountains going by in the window. Any song off Radiohead’s Kid A brings back the airport near Seattle, from when we were on the way to Colorado for a wedding and Kid A was the only record I brought or wanted to bring. ‘Crayon Angels’ by Judee Sill is the whole winter of last year. And Brian Wilson’s solo version of ‘Surf’s Up’ takes me back to driving my parents’ car around town alone at sixteen, windows down at night. I can’t ascribe exact memories to songs by The Microphones, Joni Mitchell, Built to Spill, Dungen, Harry Nilsson and so many others, and it’s a form of recall I can actually trust, there’s no visual element to complicate things, no chance of a planted memory that wasn’t actually supposed to be there.

Maybe I should be concerned that I’m alone in almost all of these memories, but I guess I was just a private kid, and music was a private experience for me. Music activates a certain mental freedom in a way nothing else can, and that is so empowering. You can call it escapism if you like, but I see it as connecting to a deeper human feeling than the one found in the day-to-day world.”

Aoife: That’s lovely. It’s a nice addendum. And he was only twenty-one.

Niall: For some reason it’s signed “Warren Gamaliel Bancroft Winnipeg Harding,” Warren G. Harding being the 29th president of the United States. I don’t know why, he thought it was funny. Dated April 6th, 2008, Chicago, Illinois.

So, any particular highlights, anything that stood out?

Aoife: I was reminded how much I love ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’, the second-to-last song. I just love those four- and five-part harmonies so much. There’s something that really gets me about beautiful harmonies stacked on each other that sound so natural. My dad was really into Neil Young and all of that era, my mum’s really into Simon & Garfunkel, so I feel like I came out of the womb going, this is the music I love.

Niall: There was another one I meant to mention.

Aoife: I’m really bad at remembering song names, which isn’t great for an arts journalist. They go in one ear and out the other.

Niall: ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’.

Aoife: That was it. I always forget the name of that one, and it’s an absolute banger. It’s quite a direct song, the last one on the first side.

Niall: He mentions his brother Sean in ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’, which is interesting. And Oliver James is his younger brother, that’s the last song.

Aoife: His sister is Aja, after the Steely Dan album. The parents were really into them.

Niall: It holds up so well. The harmonies and vocals sound incredible, there are those beautiful little flourishes, a flute on one of the tracks, the guitar is stunning, lovely little bass lines. I love the way Robin Pecknold and the band hear music. There’s a really good Song Exploder episode with him talking about a song from Crack-Up, and the way he thinks about translating his thoughts and emotions into music is so illuminating. He has a beautiful melodic flow that’s really similar to the flow of water and nature. There are so many nature references, it’s almost parody there are so many.

Aoife: You could do a Portlandia sketch about it. “Power of nature, man.” “Come down from the mountain, you’ve been gone too long.”

Niall: In terms of the line-up: alongside Robin Pecknold on vocals there was Skyler Skjelset on lead guitar, his best friend from Nathan Hale High School, later joined by Casey Wescott, Christian Wargo on bass, and Nicholas Peterson on drums, who left after this album.

Aoife: And who came in as the drummer?

Niall: A man who’s been a main character in one of these listening parties himself: Josh Tillman, Father John Misty, played drums with them.

Aoife: For how long?

Niall: Only a year or two, pretty short. As I said, main character, he was making his own record. Any Father John Misty fans? He writes really good songs and he’s handsome, so we all love him, but he’s also a bit of a pain, and he didn’t get on very well with Robin Pecknold, which isn’t surprising. When I was looking back at the Pitchfork interview they did in 2008, a few months after the album came out, it was a big joint interview with Robin and Josh Tillman, and Tillman is answering the questions at the start. That’s confidence.

Do you want to hear a quote from what Robin Pecknold said? I’ve written it in my little notebook, so old-school, that’s the only way I remember these things. In a 2020 Reddit AMA, Pecknold said that on that tour, the Helplessness Blues tour, Tillman was supposed to bring out his own record, but his label said he could only release it after the tour. So he was on tour thinking, “I want to bring out my own record, I’m tired of Fleet Foxes.” Pecknold said he “had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, general ill treatment and shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn’t have anything to do with. It sucked.” And then Tillman left the band. Whereas in that Pitchfork interview he’d said, “I love playing in this band, these are all my friends, I’m having the best time, I’m sorry if that’s a corny quote, but that’s the best thing about this experience right now.”

Aoife: So he was lying through his teeth. I think he’s the kind of person who really has to be a solo artist, too iconic a personality. You wouldn’t want to wrangle him out of bed to get to the next show.

Niall: Too big a price. You mentioned Pitchfork, the album was number one on their end-of-year list in 2008, and they listed Sun Giant alongside it, breaking the traditional conventions of end-of-year lists. What they said was: listing Fleet Foxes’ debut album and EP together may be awkward, but it just feels right, they’re two sides of a coin that equally express the band’s mastery, “a catch-all Americana that takes a wide slice of our popular music spectrum and pulls it through a reverse prism to create a gorgeous and focused sound of the band’s own. The threads of Brian Wilson’s coastal pop, Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, Grateful Dead jams and other influences are masterfully synthesised in the band’s harmonies.” Robin Pecknold’s sense of dynamics, they said, flows like a river, wild and free but logical, filling what needs to be filled and moving on. I swear I didn’t rip that off Pitchfork, I came up with something similar on my own.

Aoife: Very good.

Niall: It was Uncut’s album of the year too. But more than anything, and this is a strange accolade, the album was ranked number 36 on Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest stoner albums.

Aoife: I don’t think Robin Pecknold was a stoner. It doesn’t really fit. He’s a reader.

Niall: So what came after? Helplessness Blues, which is really difficult to say, in 2011, then Crack-Up in 2017, then Shore in 2020. Big long gaps, some personnel changes. And Robin Pecknold, as we’ve established, is a very literary guy, he went to Columbia to do an undergrad in English literature, because he’d left high school early and gone to a community college, and he really wanted that college experience. So that was part of the break. He’s also had difficult times, he’s spoken about mental health issues and suicidal ideation, many tough experiences that contributed to the gaps too. They haven’t released anything since 2020, and he does a lot of cover events. There are two live records. He’s actually playing a gig tonight, I think, where he covers Judee Sill. Any Judee Sill fans?

Aoife: Oh my gosh, she’s amazing. Nobody ever knows Judee Sill. If you listen to anything, listen to Heart Food, it’s iconic. He loves her, mentions her on this record. She’s the one who does ‘The Kiss’, people might have seen her perform it on the Old Grey Whistle Test, it’s on YouTube. She had a really tragic life.

Niall: One of those I’ve been meaning to listen to properly for years. She only has two records, so it’s easy to get into. There’s a documentary about her as well, which I haven’t seen.

Aoife: She’s one of those ill-fated seventies musicians, really religious imagery, did a lot of drugs, really interesting.

Niall: Did you get to see them again after your first foray in Berlin?

Aoife: I saw them when they toured, though it’s really bad when you can’t remember what you were doing in the 2010s.

Niall: Did anybody see them at that Dublin gig, the outdoor one in 2022? Wasn’t it amazing. They’ve played here a fair bit: Vicar Street in 2008, Electric Picnic 2009, The Marquee in Cork 2011, the Iveagh Gardens in 2017. I don’t know if I’ve missed any, maybe you can tell me.

So if you were to pick, is there any further listening or reading you’d suggest to somebody, not necessarily Fleet Foxes?

Aoife: Some of it is obvious. As I said, I’d definitely check out Judee Sill, because if you really like Fleet Foxes you’d really vibe with her. And he mentions Harry Nilsson, also unbelievable, more well known than Judee Sill, did the cover of ‘Everybody’s Talkin”. I’d also mention a guy people would have known at one point but isn’t very well known now: Richard Swift. He sadly passed away a couple of years ago. He was friends with Robin Pecknold, a hugely talented musician who struggled with addiction. He has an amazing double album from around 2005 or 2006 that’s brilliant, and a record called The Hex, which is referenced on ‘Sunblind’ on Shore, that’s the song where Robin name-checks a lot of musicians he loves, like Elliott Smith, David Berman and Richard Swift. It’s such a beautiful record for finding new people to listen to, and it’s lovely to hear a musician pay tribute to musicians he loves. The imagery is him talking about this beautiful day where he’ll go for a swim and listen to all these beautiful bands, an ecstatic kind of song. So check out all of those records, but Richard Swift deserves more fans, and The Hex is really, really good.

Niall: Good shout. What we’ll do now is play a tune, and then maybe give Sun Giant another go if you want to stick around.

Our next listening party is on the 27th of May, and it’s an indie-rock album very close to my heart: Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People. I’ve been wanting to do this one on record for a long time. They’re playing here later in the year, but I want to give this record its flowers, it’s incredible. My niece has just turned seventeen and I bought her a copy, because it’s an anthemic record for a seventeen-year-old. I can’t believe that band are still going, which is kind of mad, but it’s hard to underline what Broken Social Scene meant to a certain segment of indie.

Aoife: And there’s four hundred of them on stage. They’re from Canada, and we were all like, my God, these people are the best.

Niall: For me it’s the MP3 times again, we’ll talk about this next month. I heard about them through the music blogs, and then I got to see them in the Button Factory, which was the Temple Bar Music Centre at the time. It was one of the first things I ever wrote about, back in 2005. A transcendental experience.

Aoife: They’re so good live.

Niall: I once DJ’d in Galway after one of their gigs, and one of the members of the band, I’ll leave him nameless, came over and turned off the decks while I was DJing.

Aoife: On purpose?

Niall: He was that drunk. I can’t remember what I was playing, but I was like, great, DJing after Broken Social Scene and then a band member ruins it. I don’t think he liked it. No, I think he was just really drunk and thought it was funny. Thumbs down to him. In a way it’s surprising a man like that has managed to persist in a band with so many members. Anyway, I digress. We’ll talk about it next month, May 27th.

Aoife: I cannot wait. I’ve been listening to it a lot lately again, it’s fantastic.

Niall: Thank you for being here. Let’s play a bit of this and see what happens. Thanks for being here, appreciate it.

Overmono return with Pure Devotion, the second album from the biggest name in British dance music. Dublin trio Really Good Time land their debut. Ela Minus and Nick León join forces, the Dinner Party supergroup reconvene.Kiasmos reworking their last album, London noise-makers Man/Woman/Chainsaw and more in this week’s recommended albums and EPs.

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

New Albums + EPs

Album of the week:

Overmono – Pure Devotion 

The second album from Overmono, the Welsh brothers Tom and Ed Russell, who have spent the last few years becoming one of the defining live acts in UK dance music.

Their 2023 debut Good Lies turned a sound built from breakbeats, pitched vocal samples and widescreen emotion into festival-headlining music without losing an ounce of its warmth

 Pure Devotion arrives with an intent to switch things up somewhat, and pre-release singles have had a mix of euphoric dance (‘Lockup‘), retrosynth wave (‘Knight In Shining Prada’) and the album goes heavy on the pitched up sampled vocals from Mahali and Jaz Karis, along with vocal features from Kindora and Ruthven, and the album certainly has softer edges as it goes than its predecessor. The last song ‘After The Rain’ feels like the uplifting closing song over the film credits with nods to Enigma and vocals by Smerz.

Really Good Time – Affirmations

The debut album from Really Good Time, the Dublin band who first surfaced in 2021 with a line-up drawing on members of Beach, Fat Pablo and Wastefellow, and the pick of this week’s Irish releases. Across a run of singles and gleefully surreal, comedic music videos, from ‘Best Medicine’ and ‘Afternoon Tea’ to ‘Victory Button’ and ‘Mountain of Spit’, they built a reputation as one of the most characterful and playfully strange bands on the Dublin circuit.

The band recently reconfigured as a three-piece and Affirmations, trailed by the singles ‘Shit One’, ‘Do It’ and ‘The Love Song’, gathers that off-kilter energy into a first full-length.

The album conclusively affirms Really Good Time as a band who are aptly-named, their album fizzes with transmissible full pelt sonic energy that spills over these wry and genial rock songs.

INSTORES
August 7th – Dublin – Spindizzy
August 8th – Cork – Music Zone / Limerick – Steamboat
August 13th – Galway – Zhivago

LIVE
August 30th – Dublin – Collins Barracks (supporting Super Furry Animals & Baxter Dury)

BUY ON SPINDIZZY.

Man/Woman/Chainsaw – Cannonball

A new record from Man/Woman/Chainsaw, the London six-piece whose string-laced, lurching post-punk has earned them a fierce reputation on the UK circuit. Built around violin and piano as much as guitars, their sound swings between fragile and feral, often inside the same song. Cannonball captures a band with a genuinely distinctive voice – I’m excited and I already want to revisit it.

Play Whelan’s September 20th.

Kiasmos – II Reworked

A reworks album from Kiasmos, the duo of Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds and Faroese producer Janus Rasmussen, revisiting their 2024 album II. The album was recently premiered at a listening party in Fidelity in Dublin. Kiasmos make emotional, melodic minimal techno that bridges the club and the concert hall, and handing that material to a cast of remixers opens it up in new directions. A treat for followers of the more introspective end of dance music.

Dinner Party – Watchu Bringing?

A new record from Dinner Party, the jazz supergroup of Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder. Between them these four have shaped the sound of modern jazz, soul and hip-hop production, and their collaborative work drips with the ease of players who have nothing left to prove. Watchu Bringing? is a gathering of serious talent in a relaxed setting.

Margaret Glaspy – I Am Both

The new album from the NY singer-songwriter and guitarist Margaret Glaspy, whose spiky, folk-informed indie rock and expressive playing have made her a musician’s musician since her 2016 debut. Glaspy writes with a plain-spoken honesty and a real command of her instrument, and I Am Both is another finely made record from an artist who never overplays her hand.

Nikki Nair – The Sick Dimension EP

Los Angeles-based producer, DJ and Hud Mo collaborator Nikki Nair releases a four-track EP of drum-driven house music built squarely for the dancefloor, featuring his own vocals woven throughout.

Ravyn Lenae – Blue Island

The new album from the Chicago singer Ravyn Lenae, following the breakthrough of 2024’s Bird’s Eye and the slow-burn ubiquity of ‘Love Me Not’. Lenae makes airy, intricate R&B with a genuinely distinctive voice. Blue Island is the sound of an artist stepping up in scale. Doechii and Dominick Fike feature.

Ela Minus and Nick León – qué les pasó a mis amigos?

A collaborative album between two exciting names in contemporary Latin electronic music: the Colombian, Brooklyn-based producer and singer Ela Minus and the Miami producer Nick León. Both make club music with real emotional heft, Minus through her hardware-driven synth-pop and León through his futurist take on Latin dance forms. Together they promise a genuinely intriguing electronic record.

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ – Magickraft EP

A great joke name who also happens to release some imaginative electronic music from London with a great website, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s music is immersed in nostalgic ’90s synths and pop sounds and this latest release is ” a 7 track EP of decade-old tracks from the archives, respectfully finished and mixed with ‘method production’ for period accuracy and authenticity.”

Also released this week

• Ceremony – Tell Me Your Dream
• Hana Stretton – Tiarn
• Inspectah Deck – Dragon’s Breath
• John Carpenter – Cathedral
• Marlon Hoffstadt – Das Ist Daddy
• Maya Ongaku – Nothing Space Music
• mclusky – My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours (Reissue)
• Militarie Gun – God Save The Gun (Deluxe)
• Ravyn Lenae – Blue Island
• The Mountain Goats – Days

Another Love Story has revealed the full programme for its 2026 edition marking 13 years since the festival first touched down at Killyon Manor.

The festival runs Friday August 21st to Sunday August 23rd, and Friday tickets are already sold out.

Leading the DJ bill are LTJ Bukem, Bradley Zero, Mad Professor, and Steffi & Virginia with the live featuring Loah, rising Nialler9 favs Rua Rí, Stella & The Dreaming and Sei Green.

Lineup:

(F) = Friday

Live

• Loah
• Peter Vogelaar (Live)
• Martello
• Rua Rí
• Sei Green
• Stella & The Dreaming
• The Fynches
• The Leon Stax Equation
• Vanishing Arcs (Live) (F)

DJs

• LTJ Bukem (UK)
• Steffi (NL) x Virginia (DE)
• Bradley Zero (UK)
• Mad Professor (UK)
• Eden Burns (NZ) (F)
• Barry Mullins
• Billy Scurry
• Cian Ó Cíobháin
• Chuck (F)
• Collie & Charlie (F)
• Jonzey (F)
• Neil Flynn
• New Tropicalistas
• Pablo Santos
• Phil Slow Riot
• Pub Rockers
• Sekly (F)
• Spraoi Mór
• YHRF DJs (F)

The ALS Shiftshack Soundsystem

Featuring:

• Ali Morris
• Boogiemann
• Claire F
• Emmet HB
• Jay Skelly
• Ronan B
• Tom Heuson

With special guests:

• Paul Chambers
• Sahana
• Shiels b2b Kev O’Leary
• Shremm
• Subterranian Soul
• The Ról Over Club

A Cosmic Tribute To Sun Ra! / The Ambient Orbit (RTE Lyric FM)

• Matthew Nolan
• Lisa Dowdall
• Joanna Mattrey
• Méabh McKenna

YHRF presents Underground Rivers

• Johnny Dillon
• Paddy Hannah’s Burt Bacharach Show

YHRF Folk Club

• Phil Christie
• Méabh McKenna
• Seamas Hyland
• Special guests

Baltimore Fiddle Fair present

• Aisling Lyons, Becky Ní Éallaithe & Muireann Ní Shé
• Nonametrio
• Fohn

Programme contributions also come from Young Hearts Run Free, Baltimore Fiddle Fair and Meath Arts Office, with conversation strands featuring Kate Butler, Paula Carroll and Dave Tynan.

Alongside the music, the weekend’s programme of “Other Occurrences” includes The Ambient Orbit, Attention Bebe’s Trad Rave, Sing Along Social, Throwing Shapes Pottery and The Yoga Picnic, spread across areas including Further Afield, Moon River, The Ól Shift Hut, Shift Yard, The Ballroom and The Mellow Meadow.

Ahead of the festival, two of the lineup’s headliners, Mad Professor and Bradley Zero, play pre-party sets at Fidelity in Dublin on the Thursday and Friday of festival week, with tickets available via Eventbrite using the code AnotherLoveStory for a discount.

Final tickets are on sale now, with Saturday overnight and Sunday combo tickets, Saturday day tickets and Sunday day tickets all very limited. Friday is sold out, with no further Friday tickets or admission available. Boutique glamping through Silk Road Tents and camper van passes are also available, though running low, with glamping bookings closing Tuesday August 18th at 8pm. A return bus from Dublin to Killyon runs Saturday August 22nd at 12pm, returning Sunday August 23rd at 6pm.

Full ticket info and FAQs are available at anotherlovestory.ie/ALS26.

Jack White’s label takes over Tower Records and Hectic Records around his Irish dates, with rumoured “bootleg” sleeve editions in the mix.

Third Man Records is taking its pop-up shop concept around the UK and Ireland this summer, setting up inside a handpicked run of independent record shops from Friday August 28th to Sunday September 20th.

Two of the five stops are on this island. Hectic Records in Belfast hosts the pop-up on Monday August 31st, the same night Jack White plays the Telegraph Building, while Tower Records on Dawson Street takes it on Tuesday September 1st and Wednesday September 2nd, lining up with White’s two nights at the 3Olympia Theatre. The Dublin run may stretch into the weekend if demand holds up.

Each shop is turned into a temporary Third Man outpost for the duration, stocked with exclusive vinyl, limited edition merchandise, posters and books.

The tour follows the release of Jack White’s Frozen Charlotte his seventh album.

There is a story attached, as there usually is with Third Man. The Frozen Charlatan character from the album’s cover has been turning up online in recent weeks, and the label is hinting that the trickster has made off with a stash of Jack White records and is passing homemade “bootleg” sleeve editions into independent shops across the UK and Ireland. Each one is hand screen-printed, so no two copies are the same.

Whether any of that holds up is left deliberately vague. The label’s line is that visitors to the pop-ups can find out for themselves.

Third Man was founded by White in Detroit in 2001 and now runs as a label, pressing plant and record shop across Nashville, Detroit and London. Previous pop-ups have landed in Paris, Liverpool, Brighton and at festivals elsewhere.

Pop-up dates

• Friday August 28th – Friendly Records, Bristol
• Saturday August 29th – Beatdown Records, Newcastle
• Monday August 31st – Hectic Records, Belfast
• Tuesday September 1st and Wednesday September 2nd – Tower Records, Dawson Street, Dublin (may continue through the weekend while stocks last)
• Friday September 18th to Sunday September 20th – Monorail Music, Glasgow

Glasgow is the only stop without a corresponding Jack White show in the same city.

Everything in the pop-ups, the bootleg editions included, is first come, first served while stocks last. Sign up to the Third Man mailing list or follow the participating shops for updates.