My recommended best records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.
Album of the month:
David deBarra – Rest in Peace, Brian Wilson
Gross artwork aside, Dublin singer-songwriter David deBarra’s second album features the disarming confessional songwriter calling himself a “moan bag” for starters with the DeBarra’s endearing accented vocals sounding like Ian Lynch from Lankum playing weirdo lounge pop music backed by A Lazarus Soul, aided by a big cast of musicians including Stomptown Brass and Phil Christie (The Bonk) on piano and organ.
The album is co-produced with James Strain (Aux Phoenix) who also plays drums and bass throughout.
The album is dedicated to the titular Beach Boy (the Gaeilge-sung ‘Caoineadh Brian Wilson’ features) and DeBarra’s friends and close compatriots who clearly inspire him, and features an eclectic collection of songs – there’s a piano rock song about David Beckham, an acoustic ballad informed by OCD (‘Nina Knows the Script’), an acapella harmony number (‘No Hang-Ups for Me’), brassy rock (‘Johnny and Naomi’) and folk (‘The Day the Music Died’).
There’s a real sense of a live human person living behind these songs – barrelling through life with the support of friends and family – mislaying a passport and misssing a holiday, crying at a kids film, being thankful for friends and family, appreciative of co-workers and days off being your best self.
Rest in Peace, Brian Wilson is a record full of personal heart and warmth.
Debarra plays Arthur’s on March 16th.
Jill Scott – To Whom This May Concern
As the Philly neo-soul singer and hip-hop artist attests on the opening track of her first album in over a decade, “I do dope shit.”
Jill Scott does indeed do dope shit, on her own terms, and this sixth studio album bursts out the speakers with brassy intent – literally on the empowering swirl of ‘Be Great’, with her trademark soul highlighted with imaginative Outkast-esque production, even dipping into house on the DJ ode ‘Right Here Right Now’, produced by Om’Mas Keith, blues jazz on the admonishing ‘Pay U On Tuesday’ and the Baby and Clipse’s ‘What Happened to That Boy’-sampling ‘Me 4.’
Guests include fellow Philly Tierra Whack, Ab-Soul, JID and Too $hort are let into Scott’s brightly hued world, along with production by DJ Premier among others.
To Whom This May Concern has a vital urgency, filled with much of the neo-soul that made her name with a refreshing eclecticism that serves Scott well.
Archive – Glass Minds
The South London collective Archive, who started out in 1994 – make music that crosses electronic, trip hop, avant-garde, post-rock and progressive rock and return with their thirteenth album which has a lot of parallels to the latter-career work of genre stalwarts Massive Attack.
Nashpaints – Everyone Good is Called Molly
The Irish shoegaze and dream pop artist Finn Carraher McDonald aka Nashpaints featured on Maria Somerville’s Luster record last year, who plays drums in Princ€ss and releasing electronic tunes as FC Music on the wherethetimegoes label – just quietly put out a new full-length album released on Mirror World (Henry Earnest, famous tex).
Everyone Good is Called Molly features dreamy indie music that recalls Cindy Lee and Ariel Pink, alongside lo-fi shoegaze, and ambient pop. It’s a lovely soft landing.
Seán Being and Henry Earnest play on the record and Mel Keane designed the record artwork.
Puma Blue – Croak Dream
I was a fan of one of the two albums that South-London born, Atlanta-based artist Jacob Allen released in 2025 –the acoustic torch burning antichamber (I didn’t get a chance to listen to the other one properly such as the deluge of records coming out).
The sound of this record then is more experimentally minded once again with the spirit of cerebral trip-hop, Radiohead textured songwriting, John Carpenter cinematics, Portishead blues and ached soul.
“A Croak Dream is a prophetic dream where you see a vision of how you die,” shares Allen, “Half the songs on this record allude to how you might decide to live, act, if you somehow knew your awaiting fate. Being daring, romantic… Saying what you really mean.”
Croak Dream was recorded at straight-to-tape sessions at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios with co-producer Sam Petts-Davies (The Smile, Warpaint) with segments of songs brought to the band to improvise over and make loops off – that were then made into the final resulting songs.
A world tour was also announced with the dates ending in Dublin in Opium Rooms next June 1st.
Sotomayor – WABI SABI
Mexican sibling duo Raúl and Paulina Sotomayor return with their first album in six years drawing on electronic beats and Latin American rhythms, blending house, afrobeat, cumbia, dancehall, plena, and kuduro, drawing inspiration from artists like Jamie xx, Polo & Pan, Lewis Of Man, and Nu Gene.
Thumper – Sleeping With The Light On
Dublin double drumming alt-rock band Thumper’s second album and followup to Delusions Of Grandeur. The recent single ‘Bad Mood’ which I loved a lot features on the 10-track record.
Sleeping With The Light On is the sound of a band going full pelt with the knowledge and experience they have – these songs come as if in a flow-state of scuzzy garage rock eh, thumpers, with an energy and vitality that is feature impactful and memorable songwriting than before, with the band’s best collection of rockers to date.
The album process began before the first album was released in the band’s rehearsal room during the pandemic, with songs exhibiting a “darker, paranoid energy,” and starved of audience attention, resolved to pack the songs with colour and shade in every corner, including songs originally intended for Oisin Leahy Furlong’s solo project Anamoe Drive. The album was recorded in Donegal, in a house and drums were done in Attica Studio.
Thumper play The Academy on Tuesday March 4th.
Charli XCX – Wuthering Heights
A cinematic regal pop soundtrack from Charli serving as both a soundtrack to the Emerald Fennell film version of Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and a followup to the mega-successful Brat.
Drawing on orchestral sounds, electronic pop, stabbing booming basslines, and Charli’s innate pop melody sensibility, Wuthering Heights is a fine low-stakes return for the artist, which sidesteps and feels unburdened by post-Brat expectation. It brings in the disparate voices of alt-pop artist Sky Ferreira on ‘Eyes of The World’ and the Welsh legend John Cale on the craggy and industrial opener, with the album overall less experimental than the Cale-featuring opening song ‘House’.
Bill Callahan – My Days of 58
The gentleman singer-songwriter releases his eighth solo album and first since 2022, and continues to illuminate life and relationships with an inimitable fondness and singular directness that few songwriters can match.
It is his creative vocation of songwriting and all of the experiences it has brought him over the last 30 years with sage wise advice – “it’s important to not treat your life boat as a yacht,” as he sings on ‘Pathol O.G.’.
Recorded with live band – guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White – Bill rehearsed with each member one-on-one before embellishing the basic recordings he made with them. They were joined by Richard Bowden on fiddle, pianist Pat Thrasher, bassist Chris Vreeland, trombonist Mike St. Clair and pedal steel player Bill McCullough.
“With this record I kept thinking of it as a ‘living room record.’ I’m not talking about fidelity at all here. Living room attitude. Living room vibe. Not too loud, not otherworldly. I asked for the horns to be relaxed like someone on the couch playing, not a blast from heaven or hell.”
“The goal of every record at the recording part of the process is to get thrown out of Eden. Every session starts in Eden but you have to get out of there at some point.”
Ordnance Survey – Autotelic
The Irish electronic composer and producer Neil O’Connor’s new Ordnance Survey album was recorded in his studio at the National Concert Hall.
Autotelic was made with a gang of modular synths, systems, tape machines, piano and percussive instruments fed into software that enabled the use of machine learning models, a core feature used in AI to make decisions – in this case – the decisions were musical.
‘Autotelic’ describes an activity, entity, or experience that is an end in itself, pursued for its own sake rather than for an external reward and in the production of an album in this case, the process is the reward.
Autotelic was developed using the musical software, Max/MSP through an operation called a Markov Chain. On a very basic level, it’s a mathematical system that transitions from one state to another. Once trained, machine learning models can be used to make predictions on new data or make decisions and on this LP, Markov Chains were used to make musical decisions (pitch, tempo and timbral).
The end result is also pretty rewarding with the komische and motorik vistas of opener ‘Hyperfantastic’ with synth and percussive psychedelic experimental forays.
Mandy, Indiana – URGH
Industrial experimental noise techno band Mandy, Indiana ‘s new album on Sacred Bones, was co-produced and co-mixed by guitarist and producer Scott Fair and Daniel Fox of Gilla Band.
URGH roars out of the gate with frenetic electronics, beats, the French vocals of Valentine Caulfield rub off digital distortion and Death Grips-leaning hardcore. Billy Woods features on the track ‘Sicko!’, and Caulfield sings of “sexual assault, systemic indifference, and the omnipresence of pain.”
Big Sleep – Holy Show
The Dublin Italian indie-rock band Big Sleep debut album, following recent singles of melodic indie pop persuasion. The album was produced by Chris Ryan and features recent single ‘Crude’.
The band did a track-by-track of the record for Nialler9.
Holy Show is an album about transience; the messiness of love, the beauty in impermanence, and the constant transformation that occurs as we stumble through connection, heartbreak, and growth. Named after the Irish expression “a holy show” (a scene of emotional chaos or public embarrassment), each track on the album becomes a chapter in a coming-of-age story grounded in vulnerability and cinematic lyricism.
Daphni – Butterfly
Caribou’s Dan Snaith returns to Daphni – the moniker he started to differentiate the smudged psychedelic electronica work of his main gig as his forays into DJing and dancefloor service grew.
The gap between the two projects have decreased as the sensibility of 4/4-lead dance music has become an increased commonality across Caribou and Daphni releases, particularly on the 2024 Caribou record Honey, which could have easily be confused for a Daphni record.
Butterfly is the fourth Daphni album, the follow on from 2022’s Cherry, released on his own Jiaolong label. The album feels slightly looser than its predecessor, sure – the hypnotic and approaching utilitarian dancefloor tracks like ‘Sad Piano House’, ‘Josephine’ and ‘Talk To Me’ released in advance suggested a collection of bangers, there is range across the 16 tracks – from the French House / Daft Punk ‘Hang’, the near-sinogrime of ‘Lucky’, the soft Ethiopian jazz of ‘Napoleons Rock’ and the classic anthemic reacher – ‘Waiting So Long’ – effectively a Caribou collaboration with himself.
The album’s lack of coherence is a strength in one way – it’s not a singular vision but feels like a collection of workouts and experiments in the form – more like a DJ compilation record – “no concept or theme or whatever tying it together other than just the joy of making whatever music excited me in the moment, but somehow i think it all fits together,” Snaith says.
It’s just missing a real standout song and relies too heavily on building tracks out of single samples that don’t resonate or dig as as deeply as some of the previous instrumentals for me – that the vocal-lead ‘Waiting So Long’ billed as a collaboration with himself as Caribou is the best track here is telling, as is the recent cut-above non-album collaboration with Sofia Kourtesis).
As such as not his strongest Daphni album as its heady utilitarian dance floor feel overtakes the palpable excitement of his earlier work. Snaith is a more knowledgeable and effective producer than he was with the first Daphni collection Jiaolong in 2012, and the beats on this record are more clearly defined, 4/4 machine drum with less natural funk that made those early records shake.
Butterfly is still a very listenable and enjoyable record but an occasional drawing outside the lines that was evident on Jiaolong that made that early work so thrilling is missing here.
Cardinals – Masquerade
Cork indie-rock band Cardinals have quietly being building up a reputation particularly in the the international music media with publications like Stereogum paying attention the band’s retro scuffed indie rock sounds.
Masquerades is released on So Young Records and was recorded with producer Shrink (NewDad) at RAK Studios in London. I highlighted recent song ‘Big Empty Heart’ reminding me of early 90s rock, and the title song giving Pavement or Grandaddy, and there’s definitely a debt to the era with American influences like early REM felt throughout, particularly when the accordion comes out.
Cardinals are brothers Euan and Finn Manning, their cousin Darragh and their former schoolmates Oskar Gudinovic and Aaron Hurley.
E the Artist – Six
Leitrim label Nyahh Records takes on an alternative style than recent releases of trad and ambient but sticks with the off-kilter with the debut longform release from Nigerian-born, Dublin-based E The Artist, whose work inspired by AfroPunkism recontextualises contemporary black club genres with emphasis on noise.
Six is billed as “an incendiary opus of blown-out electronics and daring sonic abstractions, inspired by the seven seals, that posits E as a daring force within the Irish underground.”
Guest features are drawn from friends Julia Louise Knifefist, Ruby Eastwood, Mel Keane and KRAF.
E The Artist plays Tengu on March 28th.
Ria Rua – S.C.A.P.E.G.O.A.T
Irish alt-rock artist, drummer and producer Ria Rua releases a debut album with preoccupying themes of sex, power and freedom. The music draws on grunge, electronic rock and industrial with a clarion call for a better future – “music that sounds like an angry soundtrack to the looming collapse.”
“S C A P E G.O.A.T. is a protest album. It’s personal – in that all the songs are about my experiences in the world – but at its core it’s about getting angry and standing up for yourself in a world that’s gone mad.”
Błoto – We Remember J Dilla
Everyone’s favourite Polish jazz band release an album of J Dilla covers to mark the Detroit producer’s recent birthday, which would have been his 52nd, and this year is 20 years since he passed.
For several years now, his work has been celebrated each February by Błoto, masters of rebuilding music from its own deconstruction, a band that perfectly feels the pulse of modern jazz and hip-hop. It all began on February 7, 2020, with one modest concert at the Surowiec club in Wrocław, which grew over the following years into a true celebration of “Dilla Month”. Last year, the quartet Błoto honored Jay Dee’s music with eight concerts, including performances at Jassmine in Warsaw, Vertigo in Wrocław, Hipnoza in Katowice, Paul’s Boutique in Kraków, Blue Note in Poznań, Salon IKSV in Istanbul, and two shows at Monk in Gdańsk.
The reinterpretations of J Dilla’s beats in the quartet’s original, improvisation-rich arrangements were recorded in the Tri-City during the final concert of the tour. From that night, the band selected the essence, 40 minutes of music captured on the cassette mixtape you are holding in your hands. It was one of those evenings when the classics collided with fresh energy, reviving a legend in the process.
Rosie Carney – Doomsday… Don’t Leave Me Here
Hampshire-born, Irish singer-songwriter Rosie Carney’s new album was co-produced by Ross MacDonald of The 1975 and Ed Thomas and stretches her folk origins of her music with widescreen shoegaze, alt-pop, and electronic texture. Ot’s a sensibility that suits Carney’s songwriting and melodies – akin to a softer streamlined parallel to the recent Jenny On Holiday Quicksand Heart album.
Also informing the record, was Carney’s experiences of “severe existential dread, and feeling like I’m about to die” after the release of second album i wanna feel happy.
Charlotte Day Wilson – Patchwork
Canadian singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Day Wilson’s new album fuses contemporary R&B, jazz and classic soul sounds with Wilson expressive voice anchoring rich arrangements. Saya Gray features on Lean and co-writes two songs – Selfish and High Road.
Nathan Micay – Industry Season 4
The score for season four of the fintech finance bro show Industry by Nathan Micay is another cache of evocative electronic instrumentals, drawing on synth arpeggios and lush sounds.
Other old and newer albums I’m enjoying this past month
- Björk- Debut
- Dove Ellis – Blizzard
- DJ Shadow – The Private Press / In Tune And On Time / Pre-Emptive Strike
- El Michels Affair – Yeti Season
- Gang Starr – Step in the Arena
- Nick Drake –Five Leaves Left
- Rosalía – Lux
- Tangerine Dream – Dream Sequence
- Yael Naim – Solaire
- See last month’s choices.
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Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
