My recommended best long playing albums and records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.
Album of the month:
Angine de Poitrine – Vol. II
The masked Quebec math-rock duo who have amassed millions of KEXP session views and much enthusiasm arrive in a timely fashion with their second album. Raw, nervy, replayable janky math-rock that rewards the attention, with dips into Primus territory. Vol II only sticks around for six long dizzy guitar and bass punchy combo songs and a lithe 36 minutes, but bursts the seams of its duo limitations with looped riffs delivered like a warped alien transmission.
Their Dublin gig sold out in seconds.
Avalon Emerson & the Charm – Written Into Changes (Dead Oceans)
The electronic musician and eminent DJ’s second album under her Charm moniker is a step forward on every front: more groove-heavy, more dance-adjacent, more fully realised as a songwriter than the bedroomy textures of 2023’s self-titled debut, informed by translating the first album to the stage.
Written Into Changes was co-produced with Bullion, with additional contributions from Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend), and draws from five years of constant movement: touring as a DJ, relocating from Berlin to Los Angeles to New York, and the personal shifts those moves bring.
“Making Written into Changes felt like unlocking a fence and running into a big green field. I wanted to be more direct and vulnerable with my lyrics and voice, and for the instrumentation I wanted to be bolder. This album is a collection of songs about change, shards of life, and relationships whose echoes I still feel every day. I collaborated with old friends, like Bullion, Hunter and Keivon, and also new producers and musicians such as Rostam, Jay Flew, and other brilliant musicians. We made this record in the English countryside, London, and LA. I love making this kind of music and I’m so happy people can hear this album now.”
‘Eden’ has a baggy, late-80s dance-rock hybrid energy, ‘Jupiter and Mars’ is cathartic indie-pop ,while ‘Happy Birthday’ is frenetically joyful Caribou-esque synth pop with gently devastating lyrics: “Too young to die / Too old to break through.” ‘Country Mouse’ and ‘Eden’ are love songs for her wife Hunter Lombard. I love the album tracks like ‘God Dam finito’ which has a free electronic baggy vibe, and ‘Wooden Star’ with its Arthur Russell cosmic production feel. An album that embraces progress and refuses stasis.
Joshua Idehen – I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try (Heavenly)
London spoken word artist Joshua Idehen, in collaboration with producer Ludvig Parment, released his debut full-length on Heavenly.
Following the viral success of ‘Mum Does The Washing’, Idehen takes his craft somewhere more expansive: 17 tracks built around house-inflected beats, jazz elements, choral arrangements and his own ruminative, warm, deeply humanist spoken word style. Contributions come from saxophonist Pete Fraser, vocalist Amanda Bergman, and Shabaka Hutchings on flute. Themes of grief, hope, collectivism, morality and human connection, delivered with exuberant energy. I hear strains of The Streets, Real Lies and Joy Anonymous on this one.
Idehen plays Dublin’s Button Factory on April 25th.
Isa Gordon – 8Men (Lost Map Records)
Glasgow-based producer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Isa Gordon releases a second solo album digitally today, following a limited cassette run on Lost Map. 8Men builds on the layered electronic folk of her 2022 debut For You Only on Optimo Music (a record JD Twitch championed loudly before his death) but shifts the conceptual framework entirely.
These are eight tracks split evenly between four traditional folk songs and four covers from the 1970s, by Richard Thompson, Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt and Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ gets a trad ambient treatment. These songs are not faithful versions of traditional songs but cast anew with clubby electronics and modern production, anchored by Gordon’s expressive vocal.
The title and the conceit reclaims the narrative of songs by and about men: pointing out, among other things, that many old songs were actually written by women, their perspectives subtly altered in the transcription.
“It’s a bit of an ode to the format of the folk compilation; collections artists and singers make of songs that resonate with them. There are songs about love, war, family, relationships, womanhood. Like wee mini myths on the human condition. I hope it can shed a new light on some of these trad tunes – that they still live, because they are reinterpreted, and not stuck in what can sometimes feel like the stuffy constraints of ‘tradition’ (whatever that means). Music doesn’t happen in a vacuum, folk at its best embraces this in the oral tradition: hearing, resonating and retelling.”
The cover artwork is a tarot card painted by Gordon’s mother in the late 80s: The High Priestess, a woman eating an apple.
Curtisy & owin – Get A Life!
Jobstown rapper Curtisy follows up last year’s hiiki-produced Beauty In The Beast mixtape, after his 2024 breakthrough What Was The Question. Get A Life! was made with Dublin producer owin started as a smaller project and snowballed into something more expansive, shaped by duality – with the physical vinyl reflects the yin and yang: two vinyl covers, front and back, light and dark. The title also pulls in two directions – an insult / some advice.
The sound palette of Get A Life! expands beyond a pure rap template to soul and hazy dream-pop texture. Curtisy sings more, experiments more, lets curiosity take the lead. Collaborations with Lil Skag across three tracks – ‘Talk of the Town’, ‘Yesterday’s News’ and ‘Bones’ capture Irish rap underground right now. ‘Sonny’, dedicated to his mother and named for his nephew, is the album’s still centre and a genuinely moving piece of songwriting. ‘My Friends’ with Emily Beattie finds Curtisy in full pop mode: dream-haze autotune, emotional candour, striking ease. It packs a lot in under 24 minutes.
“I can’t make music if I don’t go outside and live,” he says, “but it’s difficult to go out and live with the anxiety that I have.” Get A Life! documents that tension honestly.
Robyn – Existential (Konichiwa/Young)
Eight years since Honey, and Robyn arrives crash-landing. That’s how she describes it: like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed – all those experiences searching too far out into space, now crashing back into herself. Made with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, with Oscar Holter also producing, the 29 minute Sexistential is a conscious return to the euphoric, punchy electro-pop instincts of the Body Talk era.
Lead single ‘Dopamine’ set the tone in November. ‘Talk to Me’ marks her first collaboration with Max Martin since 2010’s ‘Time Machine’. The title track is something genuinely rare: a rap about having one-night stands while ten weeks pregnant after IVF, conceived as a riposte to André 3000’s admission that he didn’t know what to rap about anymore. “It was my cue,” she says.
The album navigates her life as a new single mother and her refusal to let that circumstance dampen sensuality, desire or creative ambition. “The purpose of my life is to stay horny, it doesn’t even have to be about sex, but it’s feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy, and not letting anything take over that.”
Robyn opens world tour in Dublin this summer
Fcukers – Ö (Ninja Tune)
The debut album from New York dance-pop duo Shanny Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis, recorded in a two-week studio session with producer Kenneth Blume (formerly Kenny Beats, working here with Geese and IDLES in his recent past), with additional production from Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs across four tracks. Eleven songs in 28 minutes. It’s nearly two years since they debuted with the indie sleaze DFA-vibe breakthrough of ‘Homie Don’t Shake’.
The album guides the listener through the highs and lows of a metaphorical night out. Pure kinetic energy, peak-time party music built by people who have an air of nonchalance that you can’t help but wanna be around.
Dublin show at the Button Factory, Tuesday May 19th.
Joshua Burnside – It’s Not Going to be Okay (Nettwerk)
Belfast singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside wrote his new album after the death of his closest friend Dean Jendoubi in August 2024. “He drifted unawares into the deepest sleep,” Burnside says plainly. The album is what came out of the silence that followed, and quickly after 2025’s Teeth Of Time.
Gone are the dense layered textures and surreal folk tales of previous records like Teeth of Time. What replaced them are 10 bare songs that tell the truth in the most economical language possible. There are just his voice, warm acoustic guitar, the odd slip of strings, and the writing, which is among the best of his career.
“Grief has always been a big part of my music,” Burnside says. “It’s the reason I started writing songs when I was 13. And so, as I did all those years ago, I reach for the guitar, try a few chords and sing a few words and for a brief moment I feel like it’s going to be okay.”
James Blake – Trying Times
James Blake’s seventh studio album is also his first fully independent release, two years after leaving Republic Records released on LA-based independent label Good Boy Records in response to what he described as “a massive transfer of wealth away from the artist.”
That defiance is somehow both the album’s subject and its antidote. Trying Times is a commentary on the relentlessness of modern life – love as survival directive, creativity as resistance, hope maintained against the pull of everything collapsing – but it wears all of that lightly, pulling from across his whole career without ever feeling like a best-of.
The album opens with ‘Walk Out Music’, and the line “You’re not good to anyone dead”. Lead single ‘Death of Love’ is all warbly sub bass, the London Welsh Male Voice Choir filling out the arrangement, and a lyric that sets the stakes without melodrama. ‘I Had a Dream She Took My Hand’ and the title track bring churchy organ and arpeggiated guitars into a waltzy, gospel-adjacent warmth. ‘Make Something Up’ goes Steve Lacy-esque jangly guitar – something striking in its newness for this artist, Blake stuck “in the middle of time,” frustrated and alive. ‘Didn’t Come to Argue’ features Monica Martin (former Phox) and pivots from grand piano to a lowkey house groove mid-track in a way only Blake could make feel seamless. ‘Doesn’t Just Happen’ features British rapper Dave continuing Balke’s run of collaborations with UK rap auteurs and is an easy highlight, while ‘Days Go By’ takes a Dizzee Rascal ‘I Luv U’ sample into chopped and screwed headphone club mist territory.
Generally, the production here foregrounds his soul and gospel instincts (and with soul samples used throughout) over the dancefloor density of Playing Robots Into Heaven, though neither impulse disappears – he’s just arranging them differently here, and there’s a sense of urgency, sonic playfulness and verve that was lacking on that record.
The Scratch – Pull Like A Dog
The Irish trad-folk rock band with a penchant for power chords, percussion and occasionally soft folk’s third album is released on Sony Music Ireland, and was written at Hellfire Studio in Dublin with engineer Thomas Donoghue and producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy.
On first listen, Pull Like A Dog is largely a return to foregrounding of the band’s high voltage metallic riffs after the James Vincent McMorrow-produced Mind Yourself album, a pleasant sonic bludgeoning throughline – that doesn’t stay away long as on the ‘Cracks’ which begins more in a folk vein. Various members are heard in the studio between songs, adding a refreshing looseness to the album listen, a relaxed mood that suggests a band not overthinking it too much.
Pull Like A Dog doesn’t so much evolve their sound as detonate it and reassemble it louder.
Of the record Conor Dockery says: “As a band, this feels like a new beginning. I think the changes we’ve faced have given us a lot of room to grow, maybe into roles we felt were off limits before. Openness, perseverance, and positivity – this album embodies all of that.”
The Scratch play Iveagh Gardens on July 4th 2026.
Sugaboo, Lil Skag – Skagaboo EP
Five-track joint EP from two of Ireland’s premiere serious-but-messing rappers – Enniscorthy and Kimmage together on a fine collection of Owin-produced breezy cultural-referencing rap tunes with guest turns from Curtisy and Beddyminaj.
NIMF – Sirenoscape
New Jersey-based Irish composer, sound designer and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond aka NIMF brings pastoral experimentalism, field recordings, avant-folk horror and ambient to bear on a four-song cycle.
Sirenoscape was made in close creative partnership with Alexander Kuribayashi – whose contributed diegetic scene design, sound editing and photography.
An album of transmutation and transcendental terror. Comprising four scenes, the album functions as a sequence of ritual enactments: diegetic musicians performing within acoustic worlds that gradually dissolve into immateriality and ecstatic transit by way of metaphysical rupture..
ELIZA – The Darkening Green
North London alt-R&B artist ELIZA – eight years on from walking away from Parlophone and the Eliza Doolittle name – returned with her third independent album, her first in four years – I loved A Sky Without Stars, and The Darkening Green keeps the throughline of that clipped funk R&B style going. Plenty of stank face on this one.
Co-written and co-produced with Finlay ‘Phairo’ Robson and Emil Larbi (Loyle Carner, Sampha), the nine-track record takes its title from a William Blake poem and circles the idea that our emotional and ecological worlds mirror each other – the city wound, distraction traps, yearning for green space and softness against a backdrop of concrete and noise.
Fans of SAULT and Prince’s lite-funk touch will dig this.
Seamus Fogarty – Ships
Mayo-born, London-based Seamus Fogarty returned with his third full-length and his most expansive album to date. Written in the wake of 2020’s A Bag Of Eyes and road-tested on tour with Lisa O’Neill around Ireland and the UK, Ships blends motorik rhythms, folk tradition and leftfield electronics into a richly detailed nine-track collection. The collaborators alone signal the ambition: string arranger Emma Smith (Pulp, Beth Gibbons), drummers Chris Vatalaro (Anohni, Radiohead) and Aram Zarikian (Grasscut), horns from Joe Auckland (Madness, Oasis), with additional production from Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins) and Mike Lindsay (Tunng, Lump).
The songs are pure Fogarty – funny, strange, deeply human. ‘I Passed Your House’ is a lushly-layered requiem for a lost friend and the October bleakness of County Mayo. The title track, inspired by a Tracy Emin neon artwork on Margate harbour, sails on a breeze of sweeping pop worthy of prime Brian Wilson. ‘The Last Days of Watchmaker Joe’ is a spoken word lament about a man who built his own coffin using no nails or screws. ‘They Recognised Him’ – Cillian Murphy’s favourite Seamus Fogarty song, from the Hee Haw EP, here remastered at Abbey Road – finally gets a proper home.
“I think there’s a few miserable songs on there for sure – obligatory at this stage, but to my mind there’s something strangely uplifting about this collection, more so than anything I’ve released before. I know I have it better than most people but I still find it hard to persevere and keep going and that’s probably the main theme of the album. It’s honest in a way that my other albums haven’t always been, which is why I’m so sure it’s going to be a massive hit.”
Gigs:
May 2nd – CQAF – Sunflower Public House Belfast
May 3rd – KILKENNY ROOTS – Billy Byrne’s Kilkenny
July 31st – Aug 2nd – All Together Now Waterford
MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt & Surf Gang – POMPEII // UTILITY
A full double-album collaboration between three compelling underground hip-hop artists currently operating. MIKE and Earl have been orbiting each other’s worlds for a while and this feels like the logical realisation of that. The album comes in two halves/discs with MIKE on the first half – POMPEII and Earl taking over on the second UTILITY. They are on tour and coming to Dubin too.
War Child Records – HELP(2)
Thirty years on from the landmark 1995 Help album – which recruited Oasis, Radiohead, Blur, Manic Street Preachers, Sinéad O’Connor and more for War Child – the charity returns with a sequel that’s just as stacked. Fontaines D.C. contribute a poignant cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, Grian sings on ‘Flags’ with Damon Albarn and more and Galway rising songwriter Dove Ellis also appears alongside Anna Calvi, Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell and Nilüfer Yanya on ‘Sunday Light’.
Among the new originals, Arctic Monkeys, Wet Leg, Foals and Cameron Winter of Geese all contribute. Olivia Rodrigo and Graham Coxon of Blur take on The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’, beabadoobee covers Elliott Smith.
The collaborative album was record with producer James Ford in November 2025 in Abbey Road, during one single week. A genuinely well-assembled record for a worthwhile cause.
Features Anna Calvi, Arctic Monkeys, Arlo Parks, Arooj Aftab, Bat For Lashes, Beabadoobee, Beck, Beth Gibbons, Big Thief, Black Country, New Road, Cameron Winter, Damon Albarn, Depeche Mode, Dove Ellis, Ellie Rowsell, English Teacher, Ezra Collective, Foals, Fontaines D.C., Graham Coxon, Greentea Peng, Grian Chatten, Kae Tempest, King Krule, Nilüfer Yanya, Olivia Rodrigo, Pulp, Sampha, The Last Dinner Party, Wet Leg and Young Fathers.
Modeselektor – Classics Vol. 1 (We tried hard and failed again… enjoy!)
The Berlin duo take a unique approach to their back catalogue: rather than reissuing old tracks, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary rebuilt eight of their older records entirely from scratch – reconstructing ‘Kill Bill Vol.4’, ‘Edgar’, ‘Tetrispack’, ‘Blockchain’ and more from the ground up, starting fresh without the original files. The result is less a retrospective than a glimpse forward, an experiment in what these tracks could be rather than what they were. ‘This Track Kills Fascism’ remains politically pointed. The self-deprecating subtitle – “We tried hard and failed again” – is pure Modeselektor deadpan. More new music reportedly coming from Monkeytown this year.
Art School Girlfriend – Lean In
Polly Mackey’s third album as Art School Girlfriend is the one that ought to move her from “cult bedroom artist” to fully recognised UK producer-songwriter of the first order – to quote the press release, which for once isn’t overstating it. Lean In was self-written, recorded and produced entirely in her own East London studio, and it shows a confidence and range that her previous two records were pointing toward without quite reaching. Piano and backing vocals are provided by her wife Marika Hackman.
Shoegaze and electronic pop and experimental ambient sound collide across 10 tracks, but they’re held together by an emotional through-line: grief, joy, love and anxiety, the fragility of being here at all.
Opener ‘Doing Laps’ is dreamlike contemporary electronic, ‘L.Y.A.T.T.’ (Love You All The Time) opens with a heavy sustained organ before a house beat drops that could keep you moving for days. ‘Save Something’ is Aphex Twin adjacent ambience. ‘The Peaks’ builds a Blade Runner-atmospheric tension from sharp synth drops and light keyboard notes. All Mackey’s vocals were recorded through a second-hand dynamic mic, which lends a closeness and intimacy to even the most expansive tracks.
Fixity – Assurance (Moot Tapes)
The new album from Cork experimental music project Fixity, led by drummer and composer Dan Walsh. First album since 2024’s solo-produced FIXITY8, but Assurance is the first large-band LP since 2019’s No Man Can Tell, it marks a return to ensemble work at a larger scale half recorded at Studio Sickan in Malmö in 2022, half at Cork’s Heavy Meitheal Studios in 2023, augmented by a string ensemble, with arrangements by New York/Cork-based arranger Aine Delaney.
The Fixity project in 2026 embodies a free-wheeling experimentalism that sits at a centrepoint of jazz, psychedelic rock and roll and kosmische motorik sounds.
Ellie O’Neill – Time of Fallow (St. Itch)
The Meath singer-songwriter’s debut album was written in 10 days during the pandemic after she moved back into her family home, playing and recording late at night after everyone went to sleep, while simultaneously working on an English Literature thesis about Nightwood and queer temporality in the modernist novel. That context explains a lot about the atmosphere of Time of Fallow: intimate and night-lit, anxious and exact, full of articulate introspection.
The 10 acoustic songs have a soft glow Laura Marling intimate songwriting quality with O’Neill showcasing a gift for describing quiet moments with precision. The album was initially oriented around a specific person of affection, but O’Neill discovered something wider through the writing.
“It took all this to see it wasn’t about that person, but it was about me and the wider world. It was a portal for me to learn through.” Songs like ‘Silent Water’, ‘Half Immune’, ‘Little Sister’ and ‘Seabird’ make the case for her as one of Ireland’s most distinctive new songwriting voices.
O’Neill plays Bello Bar in Dublin on April 10th.
Alexis Taylor – Paris In The Spring
The Hot Chip frontman’s SEVENTH solo album is also his most ambitious – recorded partly at Air’s Nicolas Godin’s Paris studio, with an guest list that includes The Avalanches, Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, Etienne de Crecy, Pierre Rousseau from Paradis, Lola Kirke, and Pale Blue’s Elizabeth Wight.
The result is a freewheeling genre-blender that moves between leftfield pop, cosmic country, elegant disco-house and Vangelis-inspired soundscapes with Taylor’s completely distinctive voice holding everything together.
‘Out of Phase’, the lead single featuring Lola Kirke, was inspired by David Lynch and arrives as a country-pop duet haunted by dread. ‘I Can Feel Your Love’ is a collaboration with The Avalanches built on gospel samples – euphoric and devotional. Taylor relocated to Paris for writing sessions; the title references a psychological test where things aren’t as they appear. “You have to look for those double meanings, or what’s hiding under the surface.” As far from Hot Chip as he’s gone, and arguably his finest solo statement as a result.
deary – Birding (Bella Union)
Debut album from the London dreampop three-piece of Dottie Cockram (vocals, guitar), Ben Easton (guitar) and Harry Catchpole (drums), out on Bella Union. The band formed during lockdown around a shared love of Cocteau Twins, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine and self-produced the whole record. 11 tracks that range from shimmering shoegaze to lighter, airier indie-pop, with Cockram’s vocals up front throughout. The title references both the natural world and the sense of expansion and wonder the band wanted the music to convey, with an underlying thread about human impact on the environment. One to watch.
Eamon Harkin – The Place Where We Live
The NYC-based Irish co-founder of New York club Mister Saturday Night and Nowadays released a new solo album.
We last heard from Harkin in 2024 with the release of a four-track Noetic EP a “meditation on the lifelong search for a deep personal connection through spiritual practice.”
The Derry-born Harkin’s full-length album The Place Where We Live draws on his 25 year experience of running clubs like Mister Saturday Night, Mister Sunday, Planetarium and Nowadays with an introspective body-forward collection of electronic music operating in house, techno and ambient circles.
The title comes from psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s idea of “the place where we live,” the psychic space between the inner and outer world — where play, art, and culture help us build meaning. For Harkin, an Irish immigrant long settled in another land, that idea resonates both philosophically and personally.
The Place Where We Live captures the tension and beauty of the pulse of the club and the quiet of reflection — an album about belonging, transition, and the quiet resonance of finding home somewhere in between.
What albums are you enjoying? Join our Discord community with a Patreon membership and discuss albums with us.
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.
