My recommended best records of the past month – mostly September but some August releases and a couple of recent discoveries.
Album of the month:
Yes so it came out in August but I didn’t get to write one of these because I was away.
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.
Geese – Getting Killed
The Gen Z rockers are the buzziest band of the moment – a Brooklyn band who with this third album are ditching their previous alt-country-blues rock sound and embracing an experimental indie-rock sensibility that recalls the buzz bands of yesteryear – Wolf Parade and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, along with more underground names like Boredoms and Liars.
Lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo record Heavy Metal released in December last year was the first sign of a change of mood and vocal style but Getting Killed exudes a freewheeling experimentalism and energy that is disorientating and exciting, with Winters’ voice cragged and dank in the mix.
The album flits between various shades of alt-rock – the TV On The Radio-esque blustery jazzy “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!” rock of ‘Trinidad’, the twinkling indie yarl of ‘Cobra’, the tribal indie crescendos of ‘Husbands’, the scuffed up Vampire Weekend-esque jam of the title track, the Broken Social Scene comparison-inviting ‘Islands Of Men’, the bluesy rollick of ‘Au Pays Du Cocaine’ and the revenue-goading anthemic indie pop ‘Taxes’.
With the band being in their early 20s, the cloak of influences feels genuine and it’s chiming with a younger audience, and working for those of us who were around the block first time.
At the same time, Getting Killed creates its own merits – already a highly cited record of the year. The 2000s indie-rock revival just got its headliner.
james K – Friend
My pitch for the third album from New York artist Jamie Krasner on AD 93, is “Caroline Polachek if she made an ambient shoegaze record”.
Its dreamy pop textures are tantamount to an afterimage of the summer just gone, a transitory ease into darker colder nights with sunny hazed production.
Cate Le Bon – Michelangelo Dying
Welsh musicians and producer (Deerhunter, John Grant, Wilco, Horsegirl) Cate Le Bon’s seventh record returns to her woozy alt-pop trademark sound that I adored on 2022’s Pompeii with songs inspired by heartache sidelining a “reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism.”
Listening to Michelangelo Dying feels like being suspended in a lush-sounding reverie.
Hayden Pedigo – I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away
The Amarillo Texas guitarist’s latest album on Mexican Summer was a holiday listen this past September – its gentle guitar-lead passages and meditative arrangements soundtracked a lot of calm moments on a week off.
Fingerpicked bright guitar tones are foregrounded while piano, synths, ebow, violin, pedal steel and some light percussion add atmosphere and mood to the dusty vista of an album.
Strangely, it was the Instagram algorithm pushing Pedigo’s thoughtful tour missives into my feed that allowed me to discover I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, the avant-garde-leaning acoustic fingerpicking artist’s fifth record.
Automatic – Is It Now?
Automatic are an LA trio (Lola, Izzy and Halle) who make post-punk retro new wave music I’m always interested in hearing. Is It Now? is the band’s third album released on Stones Throw, made with producer Loren Humphrey with stated influences Patrick Cowley, A Certain Ratio and Air.
To these ears, Is It Now? also takes its cues from off-kilter ’80s synth-pop like Devo, with nods to Tom Tom Club, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Gary Numan, ESG – frankly all of which should pique your interest, along with Lola Dompé’s kinetic drumming, rubber basslines and the trio’s earworm vocals.
The Redneck Manifesto – Grushy
To the generation of alternative Irish music fans who came up in the last ’90s and early 2000s, no music sounds more like home soil than the instrumental guitar work of TRM / The Redneck Manifesto.
The trio of – Matthew Bolger, Niall Byrne and Richard Egan – released their eighth album, seven tracks not uploaded to streaming services like Spotify for reasons of responding to military tech complicity – and released on lush 10″ gatefold vinyl on TenSpot Records (who have made 10″ records their entire MO).
The songs here are as inviting as anything the band have put out over the years, an almost comforting collection of instrumental music largely rooted in the band’s trademark guitar lickery, and as with recent albums, an increased emphasis on synth textures throughout.
Turns out they do make music like this anymore.
God Knows – A Future Of The Past
Zimbabwean-Irish rapper releases his long-awaited debut album is out on narolane records. Same story, new journey.
Edited down from 50 tracks, with the the executive producer vision of Rusangango Family cohort MuRLi, 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 multicultural planned town of Shannon, by Brendan O’Regan 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.
Titanic – Hagen
Guatemalan cellist and songwriter follows up her acclaimed solo album Sentir Que No Sabes, by returning to her proggy symphonic pop project collaboration with Mexico City’s Héctor Tosta (aka I la Católica).
Through its ’80s-sounding synth and percussion pop work, it recalls the Fairlight era of Bush and Gabriel, with Daniel Lopatin contributing his trademark billowy synth sound on ‘Pájaro de fuego’ (Nate Salon – Oneohtrix Point Never, oklou – is on co-production), The duo also combine industrial speed tempos and sounds with violins and voice which adds to some experimental workout on the proggy ‘Gotera’.
NewDad – Altar
Galway indie-rock band NewDad return with assured and confident followup to their debut album Madra. Altar addresses themes of relationships, homesickness, ambition and sacrifice “and finds the trio grappling with the life they left behind in exchange for the promise of chasing their dreams”. Altar was written over the last two years after leaving Galway for London.
The band are playing Irish gigs in October and November. European dates.
pôt-pot – Warsaw 480km
The Cork/Lisbon band pôt-pot are inspired by psych and kosmische bands like Neu!, CAN, Spacemen 3 and the motorik beats and drones of those forebearers, and bring psych-rock sounds with harmonium drones and vocal harmonies and those influences are widely felt on their debut album.
They initially started as a solo project of Mark Waldron-Hyden before the rest of the members joined after meeting in Lisbon and band also features Mykle Oliver Smith, Joe Armitage, Elaine Malone (Mantua), Sara Leslie.
Primo psych and krautrock sounds.
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.
“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.
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.”
Gareth Quinn Redmond, Méabh McKenna and 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 already 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’.
Jordan Kelly – Diaspora Green Mixtape
Back when he was calling himself Jonen Dekay or Strange Boy Nature, Limerick artist Jordan Kelly made underground rap music, before his confessional trad rap music was met with much acclaim in recent years. Kelly has returned to that sound on this mixtape.
Diaspora Green is a breezy collection of rap cuts, with Kelly’s Limerick accent burning through the tracks like wildfire, and contrasts the trad-rooted style heard on his 2021 debut Holy / Unholy.
It features peers Karis Amber, aahronmm, God Knows, Hazey Haze, Dyrt, Citrus Fresh and Scruffy Munnelly, and was produced by Danny Lanham.
Ian Nyquist – Gilded
The Dublin sound artist composer’s album explores the beating heart at traditional Irish music – the handheld drum we call the bodhrán, by recasting it as source material for electronic compositions, techniques, modelling software and sounds throughout the record.
The bodhrán is transformed and refracted through these productions with an airy and icy feel, underscored by the album artwork, with ‘serpent’ an example of the percussive glacial bounce made from it, more analogous to Aphex Twin than Altan and ‘ourouboros’ an ambient techno time-shifting aurora borealis.
The mostly instrumental work, released on Flood, a label originally known for its “hard drum” electronic sound, does deign to bring in voices to sing one original Laucan on the dreamy twinkling ‘What Else Am I For?’ and two traditional tunes – Ireland-based Glasgow singer lona Zajac closes the record with a woozy reality-seam-shifting version of ‘Leis a’bháta Dhubh Dharaich (The Black Oaken Boat)’, while Cork sean-nós singer Lorcán Mac Mathúna sings the 18th-century love song, ‘Úna Bhán (Fair Una)’ enveloped in brooding noise.
Alongside the work of Róis, Lullahush and most recently Bricknasty, Ian Nyquist is the latest in a spade of Irish artists recontextualising trad music into new forms.
Mac DeMarco – Guitar
Guitar is the sixth studio album from the Mac, written and recorded in its entirety over 12 days in November 2024 at his home in Los Angeles, after scrapping another album. Smooth guitar and vocal jams are the vibe here.
Other Albums I’m enjoying this past month
There’s only so many albums one pair of ears can listen to, unfortunately. These are albums I’ve enjoyed so far but have only had a couple of listens to as yet.
- Sprints – All That Is Over
- Sven Wunder – Daybreak
- Dug – Have At It!
- Yasmine Hamdan – I remember I forget بنسى وبتذكر
- El Michels Affair – 24 Hr Sports
- Earl Sweatshirt – Live Laugh Love
- Rochelle Jordan – Through The Wall
- Buckingham Nicks – Buckingham Nicks
- Unique Freaks – Enjoyment Planted
- Wolf Alice – The Clearing
- Elaine Mai – For Us
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.
