The 50 best Irish albums of 2025

10.

Skinner

New Wave Vaudeville

The debut album from multi-instrumentalist, singer and producer Aaron Corcoran takes inspiration from the New York no wave 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 hook-filled collection features singles ‘New Wave Vaudeville’, ‘Tell My Ma’, ‘Calling In Sick’ and ‘Geek Love’ – songs which pull the thread of the humdrum – and takes inspiration from the outsiders in alternative music who populate the greatest hits of no wave, dance-punk, Latin disco and post-punk genres – Liquid Liquid, A Certain Ratio, Kid Creole And The Coconuts and James Chance And The Contortions.

New Wave Vaudeville celebrates the outsider way, the alternative thinkers and doers through personal lyrics that speak to the profound and humorous tedium of modern life, and in doing so illuminates the everyday, while dancing with sax and guitar dance-punk music abandon.

Declaration of Interest: I’m Skinner’s manager so I’m involved, advised and helped out on the album’s release and his career.

9.

Gareth Quinn Redmond, Méabh McKenna, RF Chaney

Throwing Shapes

The Irish musician trio harpist Méabh McKenna, drummer Ross Chaney and violin/synth Gareth Quinn Redmond made an album together called Throwing Shapes, and it’s a record I’ve frequently returned to for its gentle unfurling of sound – lead through harp, sustained synth notes and nuanced delicate percussion – as heard on the opening track ‘Calyx’ and similarly on ‘Sonnoh’ and ‘So and So’ (largely sans percussion), amidst ambient passages on ‘Meant To Say’ and vintage synth-lead filmic score on ‘Lo And Behold’.

8.

Junior Brother

The End

Kerryman Ronan Kealy’s wonky folk music project arrive at third album milestone and continues to push his music into odd and engaging shapes informed by traditional music and folkloric flights of musical fancy.

Much of The End (co-produced with John “Spud” Murphy) is a stated attempt to open up the veil into other worlds, made to be performed nocturnally in a fairy fort field, while illuminating and reflecting the madness of contemporary living.

Much of the album’s inspiration was drawn from UCD’s Folklore Collection on duchas.ie, “I delved into the manuscripts—endless eyewitness accounts of Fairy Forts being stepped into and the land altering, the familiar mutating,” Junior Brother shares. “Farmers, teachers, the sober, the smart—all losing their way home one way or the other.”

“The sound of the album is supposed to take the organic instruments of Irish traditional music and lift them somewhere else,” Kealy says, “like the otherworldly Irish music sometimes heard from Fairy Forts at twilight on country roads, impossible to recreate upon hearing.”

The effect is disorientating, with Kealy’s madcap-leaning vocals cutting through the discombobulation along with tin whistle and his trusty foot tambourine, as harmonium, violin, accordion and guitar among other instruments swirl around the record burrowing deeper into a mystical mire.

7.

Bricknasty

Black’s Law

The Ballymun punk-jazz band’s music gives D’Angelo from Dublin vibes, while pulling from Irish trad alongside its jazz origins. Their latest mixtape/EP release Black’s Law intends to be “a visceral exploration of faith, political disillusionment, and the volatility of human nature.”

Made after a recalibration of the band’s personnel which prompted “a radical reset”, and featuring guests Aby Coulibaly, F3miii and Willa Lee, Black’s Law is as nebulous as it is hypnotic, a kaleidoscopic mix of live band rap production, gospel and soul-torn psychedelia, drenched in Irish folk and metamorphic vocals.

6.

Lullahush

ithaca

The Irish producer Daniel McIntyre’s Ithaca album explores Irish traditional culture through the lens of a digital workstation interface, applying electronic sensibilities and techniques to ancient instrument sounds.

Often feeling like an exploratory collage of the source material and its modern cousin, Ithaca is a busy and fizzy album that feels like its excavating the walls between then and now, finding a liminal place for the two practices of music to co-exist.

Irish traditional melodies are processed and bent to a digital space, further developing the renewal of interest in traditional sounds in recent years here (see #18 for something similar), and the presence of Saileog Ní Cheannabháin ( ‘An Droighneán Donn’), Maija Sofia ( ‘Jimmy An Chladaigh’ / ”Maija an Uisce’) and recordings of Irish keening as on last year’s essential Irish release Mo Léan by Róis.

5.

God Knows

A Future Of The Past

The Zimbabwean-Irish rapper’s long-awaited debut album, edited down from 50 tracks, with the executive producer vision of Rusangango Family cohort MuRLi may subvert your expectations. You may expect a pure rap album from God Knows but A Future Of The Past is a much more varied record addressing Irish and African history shot through with a deeply personal perspective from Munya God Knows himself and of his family.

Black oppression and colonisation is a topic in the middle of the record on ‘The Heartless Stone’ and ‘Ode To The Ancestors’ in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the latter where God Knows illuminates the true story of his ancestor Chief Makoni who was beheaded by the British army in the late 20th century – and how the British took his head back to a museum where it still is stored to this day.

Ireland’s anti-jazz movement of the 1930s is an inspiration for a track ‘The Earth Is Ours, Immoral Azz’, along with the Brendan O’Regan-planned multicultural town of Shannon where God Knows and family settled upon arriving to Ireland, which allows GK to illuminate thoughts on identity and expectation on ‘The Art Of Alienation’.

There’s also contributions from talented family members Godw1n and Dreddy on the drilly Afro banger ‘It’s Been To Long’ and sister Omgjojo sings on ’18 Inch War & Eternal’. Among the Afro jazz beats and thoughtful verses are contributions from Jafaris, Doda Jawn, Farah Elle, Salamay and King Pallas.

2.

For Those I Love

Carving The Stone

The second album from David Balfe follows up an intensely personal debut album about the passing of a best friend and the grief that engulfs in the aftermath, with a record that turns its attention to wider issues and the effects they have on working-class Irish man – technofeudalism, capitalism, the rise of the far-right, the ravaging of Dublin city’s soul and pushing through it all in search of a place to belong.

The productions are sharp, spectral and shaking with club-ready synths, piano, basslines and crashing drums, with a greater dynamic range in the songs and Balfe’s spoken rallying words.

Balfe is a rare songwriter, whose meaning and intent is keenly felt – you can feel the anguish, frustration and hope amongst the desire for something to hold onto throughout Carving The Stone. In doing so, Balfe wisely sidesteps the heavy expectation and themes of his debut, and establishes himself as a keen observer and commentator on modern urban living.

1.

CMAT

Euro-Country

The third album from Ireland’s global pop star makes good on the cheeky promise of her nascent career. CMAT is now genuinely one of the finest songwriters and live performers operating in a global context, with Euro-Country reflecting Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s own brand of pert and hearty countrified pop singalong anthems, writing with supreme confidence about her lack of it, self-examining with a poignancy, self-awareness, melancholia and pop culture.

CMAT has been a great lyricist and songwriter since the beginning, with an ability to encapsulate a home truth in a funny grinned line or relate her own experience through a larger scale – with every song featuring at least one lyric line to make you guffaw or hit you in the feels.

Not much has changed musically but producer Oli Deakin is back continuing the fruitful partnership the pair developed on the debut album 2022’s If My Wife New I’d Be Dead.

Euro-Country is a better record than the debut and 2023’s Matias Tellez-produced Crazymad, for Me, with CMAT’s songwriting prowess finding yet another higher level once again.

There’s a gliding level-up gallop to these songs that is best encapsulated by the title track, which has quickly inserted itself on the mantle as the best song inspired by the ravaged wake of the Celtic Tiger on Ireland’s people, a country, in keeping with her lyrical themes – she has called “the most toxic boyfriend I’ve ever had”.

The album features some of CMAT’s best single songs – ‘When A Good Man Cries’ is ebullient country pop, ‘Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’, ‘Running/Planning’ and ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’ are top tier Euro-Country bangers, adding up to one of the most replayable albums of the year.