The 20 best songs of January

Olafur Arnalds, Talos, Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds and more

We Didn’t Know We Were Ready

In early January, a bunch of Eoin French’s talented music collaborators, family and companions came together to perform a song on the Tommy Tiernan Show in tribute to the Cork artist who passed away in August last year.

The official studio recording of the song ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’ was officially released a few weeks later.

The song was originally created at Cork festival Sounds from a Safe Harbour when Eoin French of Talos, Icelandic composer and producer Ólafur Arnalds wrote it with Niamh Regan and Ye Vagabonds in 2023, and subsequently performed the song at the River Lee Hotel.

The song starts with French’s poignant vocals, and features contributions from his friends, family and collaborators: Sandrayati, The Staves, JFDR, Memorial, Christof van der Ven, Laoise Leahy, Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds, Myles O’ Reilly, Ross Dowling, Eoin’s wife Steph French and Icelandic orchestra, SinfoniaNord.

More on the song.

Sharon Van Etten

Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)

Sharon Van Etten and her band The Attachment Theory dropped a new song called ‘Trouble’ last month, which sounded like a nice krautrock-leaning album track from the forthcoming record this February that has already given us the anthemic ‘Afterlife’.

I want to highlight the December single though as I missed it at the time, ‘Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)’ has a real early 90s alt-rock single feel to it. That’s three for three for this album so far.

Sharon Van Etten and her band The Attachment Theory play Dublin Thursday, 21st August 2025 at National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks.

Japanese Breakfast

Orlando In Love

Michelle Zauner has announced the release of her fourth album on Dead Oceans, due March 21st, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) takes its title from a line in the lead single ‘Orlando in Love’, an string-assisted acoustic-grounded track, with pretty production.

It was produced by Blake Mills – who has worked with Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple at the famous Sound City studio in Los Angeles.

It’s the first album since 2021’s Jubilee, and the release of her can’t-recommend-highly-enough memoir Crying In H Mart – one of the best music-related books in recent years.

With success, Zauner “felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realised if I kept going I was going to die.”

As such, the story of Icarus, and the folly of ambition is theme for the record.

Lead single ‘Orlando in Love’ a reference to John Cheever’s short story In the World of Apples, based on Orlando Innamorato by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo. In Zauner’s version, the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto.

FKA Twigs

Keep It, Hold It

Despite the unwieldy word anchoring FKA Twigs’ newest album, her third since 2019’s Magdalene, Eusexua is as intended, an exploration of euphoria and transcendence, the rush of anticipation – a certain je ne sais quoi feeling familiar to us all.

How this translates on record for twigs, is a full-bodied dance record, with ’90s dance music – rave, trance, pop, underground electronic sounds to the forefront on an album that seeks and celebrates pleasure with her most focused and present songs to date.

The whole thing is a fun thrill ride with twigs never straying to far into obfuscation or ambience, staying front and centre, and in the spotlight.

‘Keep it, Hold It’ is one of the quieter songs on the record, but it’s awash with lush melody and easterly instrumentation, and a sense of uncertainty, that immediately stood out on first listens.

Skinner

Sour Milk

I won’t go on too much about this one as I’m involved in the release in a manager capacity, but critic hat off, proud to have the full-length Skinner album New Wave Vaudeville out in January.

‘Sour Milk’ is an urgent track concerned with modern malaise, shot through with a Gilla Band-esque urgency (Dara Kiely taught Aaron how to scream effectively, which you can also hear in vocal exercise form on ‘Do Re Mi Fa”).

Waking up on Tuesday
I thought it was a Thursday
I couldn’t find my hat
So I started wearing lampshades
Panicking in Centra
Tearing up in Tesco
Crying at the tills
Because I couldn’t find the pesto

The debut album from multi-instrumentalist, singer and producer Aaron Corcoran’s no wave project takes inspiration from the New York scene in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s; specifically, the titular variety freak show that took place at the 57 Club in New York from 1978 to 1983. The club was known for its free-form art shows, a debaucherous wild riposte to creeping commerciality of modern culture of the time.

The ten-track collection features previous singles ‘New Wave Vaudeville’, ‘Tell My Ma’, ‘Calling In Sick’ and ‘Geek Love’ and is released on vinyl through Faction Records.

See Skinner Live:

Feb 6 – Ireland – Galway Roisin Dubh
Feb 7 – Ireland – Dublin Whelans
Feb 8 – Ireland  – Waterford Phil Grimes Pub
Feb 18 – UK –  Manchester The Lodge at The Deaf Institute
Feb 19 – UK –  London The Shacklewell Arms
Feb 20 – UK Brighton – The Hope & Ruin
Feb 21 – UK – Southampton Heartbreakers
Feb 22 – UK –  Bristol The Lanes
Feb 27 – Ireland  – Cork Winthrop Ave
Feb 28 – Ireland – Limerick Dolans Kasbah
Mar 1 – Ireland – Kilkenny Cleere’s Bar & Theatre

Squid

Building 650

English art-rock quintet Squid’s new album Cowards is released on February 7th on WARP, and the Japan trip-inspired ‘Building 650’, which shapeshifts from its foundation of alt-rock to a growing orchestral influence.

“It’s a song inspired by our first ever trip to Japan. We played the Summersonic festival in 2022, luckily we were booked to play 2 days after the COVID travel ban had been lifted, because of this we felt like some of the only tourists in Tokyo. On the plane I read in the Miso Soup by Ryu Murikami and watched Lost in Translation out of excitement and later decided to write lyrics about being an outsider visiting Japan, including a very particular type of loneliness one can feel visiting a country that is so different from their own. This loneliness feels exaggerated in Tokyo, on the surface it’s hectic and full of people but when you listen, it’s eerily quiet.”

The video was directed by longtime collaborator Felix Geen who shot the video in Japan alongside local directors Daisuke Hasegawa and Kuya Tatsujo.

“For this script, I believed it was necessary to incorporate not only inspiration from the novel (In The Miso Soup) but also scenes from contemporary Japan,” says Kuya. “The wave of technology is overwhelming, and an intense sense of fear, driven by the need to interact with others, envelops the city. Amidst this, I think I was able to depict the young people struggling to live and the landscape of the city.”

Anna B Savage

Donegal

The salty sea and air of the further reaches of Donegal seep into You & i are Earth, the latest album from Anna B Savage, who recently made the North Irish county her home.

‘Donegal’ from the record (which was produced by John ‘Spud’ Murphy [Lankum]) recounts the artist’s first dip in a cold sea, and encountering love with a local in the relative wilds of the place. Savage is acknowledges her mother telling her to come back to England soon, the crux of an sorry-not-sorry for falling in love with the place:

The day I left home, my mother said to me
“Whatever you do, don’t fall in love
Please come back to me”
Well, I’m sorry, mum, I’ve gone and done it
The moss and the views, and that lovely man too, ooh

Savage is also self-aware enough to speak of her home country’s general lack of interest in our shared colonial past.

You & i are Earth also features Irish artists Anna Mieke, Kate Ellis and Caimin Gilmore from Crash Ensemble and Cormac MacDiarmada from Lankum.

Tour dates:
12 Feb – Lantern, Bristol UK
13 Feb – Night & Day, Manchester UK
14 Feb – Stereo, Glasgow UK
15 Feb – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds UK
17 Feb – Hare & Hounds, Birmingham UK
18 Feb – Patterns, Brighton UK
19 Feb – Where Else, Margate UK
20 Feb – Union Chapel, London UK
20 Mar – Coughlan’s, Cork IRE
21 Mar – Roisin Dubh, Galway IRE
22 Mar – Unitarian Church, Dublin IRE
12 Apr – Botanique Rotonde, Brussels BE
13 Apr – Petit Bain, Paris FR
15 Apr – Bummann & Sohn, Cologne DE
16 Apr – Franzz Club, Berlin DE
17 Apr – EKKO, Utretch NL
22 Apr – Moby Dick, Madrid ES
23 Apr – ZDV, Lisbon PR
24 Apr – Club Sauvage, Barcelona ES
28 Apr – Belleza, Milan IT

Sam Amidon

Three Five

The London-based Vermont folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon has been spending a lot of time in Ireland recently, performing in Michael Keegan-Dolan and Teaċ Daṁsa’s Nobodaddy and playing a show at the Gate Theatre.

Sam’s new album Salt River, released on River Lea (Rough Trade) is a long form collaboration with producer Sam Gendel with the aim of reinterpreting and regenerating 10 folk songs Sam has gathered over the years.

As is expected with Sam’s songcraft, there is folk beauty aplenty throughout, as Amidon brings old song to a new place, as on my album highlight ‘Three Five’, a lush arrangement of traditional song ‘The Old Churchyard’ that swells in rippling fashion.

The Weather Station

Mirror

‘Mirror’ is the highlight from Tamara Lindeman’s new album Humanhood, her first since 2021.

The song references the climate crisis, “you were dousing your fields in a chemical rain, you were cutting my arm to transcend your own pain / Oh but god is a mirror – everything is.”

Of the song, Lindeman said:

“I wanted the song to warp and disintegrate; to come in and out of being like the imaginary scaffold that holds up a fantasy or cognitive dissonance. In the end, the band grows garbled and comes apart, giving way to a suspension of synth and string textures. I wanted it to feel like being bathed in light; maybe the light I was talking about in the song.

The Weather Station Tour Dates
Thu. Mar. 6 – Brighton, UK @ CHALK
Sat. Mar. 8 – Dublin, IE @ Button Factory
Sun. Mar. 9 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club
Mon. Mar. 10 – Glasgow, UK @ Saint Luke’s
Tue. Mar. 11 – Manchester, UK @ Band On The Wall
Wed. Mar. 12 – Bristol, UK @ The Fleece
Thu. Mar. 13 – London, UK @ Islington Assembly Hall

JPEGMAFIA

Protect The Cross

Peggy dropped the Director’s Cut version of his recent album I Lay Down My Life For You, and it features this new track, encapsulating the rap, rock, punk, noise fusion of the album as a whole.

Caribou

Climbing (Solomun Remix)

‘Climbing’ from Dan Snaith’s latest Caribou album Honey, already has that spinning disco ball glittery effect in its main melody, but for the remix, no less than the German producer and DJ Solomun, best known for his DJ residencies in Ibiza takes the source material and gives it a subtle production for dancefloors.]

Not that the original needed much work, with Snaith as able as anyone to spin a dance track these days, but Solomun adds some Daft Punk-esque funk glitter and French Touch dynamics to the original, extended it out to eight-plus minutes on the club mix.

It’s the kind of remix that would have you hankering for a dance.

Joy Orbison, Joe James

Bastard

Even before the release of club smash hit ‘flight fm’, Joy O was on a renaissance with that kicked off in 2021 with the still slipping long player, and hasn’t let up since.

So the English producer kicks off 2025 with another woozy electronic banger on XL with Southend London rapper Joe James, that echoes the work featured on that 2021 album.

We made bastard in a few hours, on a rainy day in west london. this was the first time id met Joe but i realised quite quickly that we were both exploring similar musical ideas. joe had a really distinct sound in his head which was refreshing. he’d caught me a bit off guard in honesty but eventually i played him something that i doubt i would even have considered before the session. he was instantly like ‘ye, let me try recording something’. the vocal you hear on the track was the only take we recorded. he held the mic while in his hand while perched on the sofa behind me. pretty sure he was sandwiched in by a few people too so i’m surprised we got this in one take. no ad-libs, no doubles, we didn’t even try re-recording it, we knew we had it. there’s a nonchalance to Joe’s delivery that underplays the vivid images he paints in your head. i can’t listen to this track without visualising what he’s saying. you work on ideas so much that you can’t help but spoil it for yourself, but bastard took on a life of its own from the second it left the studio. i listened to it on repeat in the cab on the way home as if i was hearing it for the first time. i hope you like it to”

MIKE

Man In The Mirror

Brooklyn rapper MIKE is quietly becoming one of my favourite current MCs, and Showbiz! is just the latest in a line of fine albums of his id, that includes collaborative album Faith Is A Rock with Wiki and The Alchemist, solo albums Burning Desire and Pinball with Tony Selzter, and appearing on Earl’s 2023 album Voir Dire.

 Showbiz!, is another drop of kaleidoscopic production and texture anchored by MIKE’s streaming rhyme flow. Pick almost any track from it, it’s one of my albums of the month.

He plays Dublin late February.

Poser

Good Time

Dublin producer Adam Kelly aka Poser drops a head-spinning new tune with an almighty kickdrum and a kaleidoscopic house-gospel sample in ‘Good Time’, a song for which the excellent video underscores the sequencer sample nature of the track with a vosual flourish.

The video was shot in the Workman’s Club by Iarla Mackeon, which was inspired by a scene in the TV show Wu-Tang: An American Saga.

 “I made the first version of this track over two years ago and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Following a move to London and the opportunity to experience a difference in clubs, I made this final version of the track with the image of it being played in a large warehouse or venue and even designed the beginning of the track to sound like walking into a venue and how the music sounds from outside’”

POSER will be making his live debut in London at the Roundhouse ThreeSixty Festival in April.

Richard Dawson

Gondola

English singer-songwriter Richard Dawson specialised in homespun songs that speak to the everyday details of modern living.

‘Gondola’, from forthcoming album End of the Middle out February 14th on Domino  is sung from the point of view of a grandmother reflecting on her life, it’s the realest, truest song you’ll hear this week.

Puma Blue

Tapestry

South-London born, Atlanta-based artist Jacob Allen returned with a stripped back gentle acoustic song, his first since 2023’s Holy Waters.

The song’s expressive guitar lines are what drew me in.

“We lose things, things we think we’ll have forever. It can devastate the fabric of our reality. I wrote this song to someone I lost who taught me a lot, someone I counted on having much more time with. I only recorded ‘tapestry’ as one writes in a journal, without intention to share it with anyone, just a private expression. But with a little nudge from my friends, here I am again, offering my whispers to the wind.”

Puma Blue

Pink Siifu

Alive & Direct’! feat. Elheist, Ss.Sylver

Released mid-week last week, BLACK’!ANTIQUE is the fourth album from rapper and producer Pink Siifu, a guest-stacked experimental noise-rap record of which ”Alive & Direct’! is among its most abrasive sounding like Death Grips jamming with Suicide in a wind tunnel.

BLACK’!ANTIQUE features 454, BbyMutha, HiTech, Ho99o9, Liv.e, B L A C K I E, Big Rube, Monte Booker, V.C.R., WiFiGawd, Big Rube along with production from iiye, Kal Bankx, Butcher Brown’s DJ Harrison & Morgan Burrs, Nick Hakim, Fatboi Sharif, HiTec.

Youth Lagoon

Speed Freak

Idaho-based songwriter and producer Trevor Powers will release a new Youth Lagoon record on February 21st called Rarely Do I Dream, followng on from 2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, and last year’s 7″ featuring ‘Football’.

‘Speed Freak’ marks a more upbeat sound for Powers, synths and dirt-flecked drums adding up to an affirmation in the face of death.

“This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” Powers says. “We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. The more I’ve learned to die to myself, the more I’ve learned there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life. Someone told me a couple years ago, ‘I have good news for you and I have bad news. The bad news is Trevor is doomed. There’s no hope for Trevor. The good news is — you’re not Trevor.’ When I heard that, it clicked.”

Pebbledash

Slowly Slowly

Six-piece alternative rock band Pebbledash’s single from their Four Portraits of the Same Ugly House EP brandishes dark guitar tones and an eerie atmosphere to a shoegaze crescendo.

“Slowly slowly is a song about the desire to belong, be seen, and in many ways the selfishness of needing recognition….. recorded in complete darkness in an attempt to capture that feeling of isolation and translate it to the music Slowly Slowly jumps between catharsis and longing, it is our statement of the ‘beautiful ugly’ the things you want but know you shouldn’t and the heartbreak when things don’t happen like how you dream.”

Upcoming tour dates:
Feb 9th – The Hope & Ruin, Brighton
Feb 10th – The Elephants Head, London
Feb 27th – Winthrop Ave, Cork (Skinner support)
Mar 28th – Dolans, Limerick (Howlers Support)
Mar 29th – Whelan’s, Dublin (Howlers Support)
Mar 30th – Ulster Sport’s Club, Belfast (Howlers Support)

John Glacier

Ocean Steppin’ feat. Sampha

London rapper, producer and poet John Glacier has been one of my favourite new artists of the last two years, so very excited to hear how it all sounds together on the debut album Like A Ribbon out February 14th on Young.