Irish artists rule the roost this month, with nine of the 19 albums below from Irish acts. Gilla Band’s Pugnello, a pressure cooker of grief, schizophrenia and Power Rangers, is my album of the month, joined by new records from Trá Pháidín, girlfriend., The Mary Wallopers, Sorcha Richardson, Gurriers, Strange Boy, Sarah Crean and Last Apollo. Further afield, there’s the big, dumb and brilliant debut from 300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks, Julia Jacklin’s The Gem, and albums from Cyst, Actress, Sylvan Esso, Empress Of, Colin Stetson & Brìghde Chaimbeul, Son Lux, Jam City and Boy Harsher. Here are my recommended best albums from September.
Album of the month:
Gilla Band – Pugnello
The fourth album from Gilla Band, the Dublin four-piece of Vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner – whose scouring, gleefully abrasive noise-rock, with collapsing riffs, whipping walls of noise and Dara Kiely’s frayed, funny and harrowing lyrics are always a welcome return, particularly when the world has recently been matching the band’s discordant discombobulation in its current affairs.
Pugnello, has made them a unique proposition have become one of the most thrilling and uncompromising forces in modern music, and not just here in Ireland.
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‘Placeholder’ turns his comfort-distractions into a portrait of his own mind with a diving techno-bassline leading to Kiely’s frank confession of “I’m blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay”, ‘Giraffe’ finds unexpected tenderness in an Irish mammy chasing him out the door with a hairbrush despite its clopping techno outro and ‘Three Hands Clapping’ finds the recent transplant to Cork alienated from his hometown unfamiliar with the characters who inhabit it (“Dublin in season four”).
Even the title is odd: the name of a haunted font on a laptop from a horror novel by Kiely’s uncle, while the sleeve is his own painting worked over blurred, badly framed tour photos, making a positive out of a negative. As he puts it in liner notes accompanying the release, you get through things, not over them.
Musically, the album feels even more of a pressure cooker than before, with the band clearly more readily moving beyond a foundation of guitar music in favour of pummelling industrial hits, metallic noise, pulsating techno-inspired basslines and found digital textures rupturing a hole in the Gilla Band space-time continuum.
300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks – This Is Spa Town!
The duo’s contrasting screamo rap vocals and a bassline productions debut album on XL Recordings is a salve to today’s polite-sounding music landscape. Taking inspiration from 2000s genres screamo, chiptune and bassline, THIS IS SPA TOWN! is one of the brightest music releases of the year, spilling with energy, youthful verve and giddy sonics.
In an age where everyone’s public Instagram is manicured, filtered and curated, the debut album from 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks is akin to reopening a messy Bebo account and sprawling nonsense and in-jokes over your friend’s wall.
Sometimes you just need to listen to something big, dumb and really well done – not over think it and pump out the jams. THIS IS SPA TOWN! , the just-released 22-minute debut album from two spa town dwellers is a refreshingly unburdened listen.
Trá Pháidín – Cloch ‘s Claí
Trá Pháidín‘s second album and the Irish collective’s first for World of Echo, built like a dry-stone wall, with each of its ten tracks as one stone, the follow on to their debut album An 424 – a loose concept album written in honour of the bus that goes from Galway city to Connemara.
Cloch ‘s Claí pushes further into the improvisational territory the collective have been building towards, drawing from ornamentation and accompaniment traditions in Irish trad music alongside krautrock, free jazz, post-rock, minimalism and drone.
The album satirical look at Ireland’s relationship with its native language and the Gaeltacht, inspired in part by Myles na gCopaleen’s 1941 novel An Béal Bocht (also known as Brian O’Nolan, also known as Flann O’Brien), touching on tokenism, housing, gentry politics and ribbon developments along the way with John ‘Spud’ Murphy doing some recording, co-production and mixing too.
The song ‘An Béal Bocht’ with its trad meets jazz meets psych-rock is the best thing the band have done yet – easily one of my songs of the year, and the album is full of songs as engaging as it and overall builds richly on their debut with sprawling widescreen compositions against the tension-filled backdrop of an Irish heritage been squeezed out of every stone bit by bit.
Go out of your way, reliant bus route or no, to see this band live wherever they are.
Trá Pháidín Live
- 31 Oct – Cape Clear Island, Co. Cork
- 7 Nov – Teach Damhsa, Glaise Beag, Corca Dhuibhne (Dingle Peninsula)
- 21 Nov – Expected Music, Walthamstow Trades Hall, London
- 6 Dec – The Button Factory, Dublin
- 20 Dec – Boole Library UCC, Cork City
girlfriend. – Carousel
Second album from girlfriend., the Dublin-Limerick five-piece who have become one of the most thrilling bands in Irish music. Formed almost a decade ago, their music pulls from emo, slowcore, grunge, punk and garage-rock.
Carousel gathers a shapeshifting intensity into a long-player, with moments of screaming catharsis followed by vocal harmony – the album was trailed by the singles ‘Kitchen Sink’ and the purgative, doom-laced ‘Horses’.
Ambitious, cathartic and increasingly fidgety stylistically, Carousel is an album borne of the moment – aware of the zeitgeist explorations of shoegaze and slowcore, but pre-existing and prone to heavier eruptions, creating an album that runs the gamut of guitar-lead rock performance with ease, across its short 28 minutes.
Their debut album To Be Quiet came out in 2023.
The Mary Wallopers – Paddywhackery
The Dundalk trad-folk crew The Mary Wallopers, are on their third album now, and have become one of the most beloved and riotous live bands in Ireland. Built on rebel songs, drinking ballads with a strong political and social justice stance, their rowdy take on Irish folk is only getting more big-band, and it’s easy to see why they are playing a huge 3Arena show in Dublin this December.
Paddywhackery was recorded with James Skelly of The Coral and led by the single ‘Crowns Of England’, Paddywhackery is Irish rock’n’roll – trad-wearing pint-drinking entertaining raucous good time never too far from a truth – it’s a line that the band have walked the best of their peers – maintaining a humorous disposition and a raucous cutting edge.
With the full band oin board – Ken Mooney on drums, Róisín Barrett’s on bass, Catriona Gribben on accordion and Finnian O’Connor’s on pipes and whistles, there is an unmistakable parallel musically to The Pogues, but the Hendy brothers don’t have the punk sneer of MacGowan but they have his spirit.
Cyst – ᲘᲘ
Cyst is a new collaborative project featuring the inventive producer Iglooghost along and vocalist daisy* (fka BABii.). Debut album ᲘᲘ (pronounced ‘Rabbit’) is released on on LUCKYME®, and leans into a hip-hop mode albeit shot through the lens of the hyper-frenetic style of an Iglooghost production – making it a restless, ever-shifting sonic adventure, with influences drawn from rediscovering experimental hip-hop records of the past on Anticon and including Cannibal Ox, and was made while raising their first baby.
“We got fixated on a really brief moment where weirdo hip-hop and IDM crossed paths at the very start of the millenium. We became really keen to excavate our favourite old records with this very distinct hybrid genre DNA. Presumably this moment in music quickly fizzled out due to the shows emitting too much body odour. We wanted to try and make songs that felt like a speculative continuation of computer music and mouthbreather hip-hop after a 20 year gap in the historical record.”
Actress – Radical Frame
The return London producer Darren Cunningham aka Actress, one of the most singular voices in British music – work of a Black avant-garde. Cunningham makes smeared, dubbed-out, deliberately degraded electronic music that always feels like it is dissolving at the edges, and Radical Frame is another dispatch from his strange and rewarding world. Casisdead and Rainy Miller feature on this album, the latest in his run of inter-dimensional electronic compositions, that leans towards an album of smouldering ambient embers.
Julia Jacklin – The Gem
Julia is always welcome around here. The Gem is the fourth album from Julia Jacklin, the Australian singer-songwriter whose stark, emotionally exacting writing, across records like 2019’s Crushing and 2022’s PRE PLEASURE, has made her among the most affecting songwriters of her generation. Her debut for 4AD, The Gem turns on a tension she calls the central question of her life: the pull between wanting to love and be loved and wanting to be free. Named after the Melbourne bar that became home after she moved from Sydney, it was dug out over nearly a year at Rat Shack studio above the pub, self-produced with Robert Muinos and cut with a tight band of friends. Led by the ’80s-jangle single ‘Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)’, it is a soaring document of a songwriter finding her way back to herself, and likely to be one of the records of the autumn from one of my favourite voices and lyricists in music.
Julia Jacklin plays the National Stadium in Dublin next February.
Sorcha Richardson – Draw The Outline
The third album from Sorcha Richardson, among the finest songwriters in Irish music today. Since her 2019 debut First Prize Bravery and 2022’s acclaimed Smiling Like an Idiot, the Dublin artist has built a reputation for sharp, emotionally precise writing, wrapping everyday heartbreak and hard-won clarity in warm, widescreen indie-pop.
Out on Faction and trailed by the single ‘Grenadine’, Draw The Outline finds her writing at its most assured. Intimate, melodic and deeply felt, largely focusing on acoustic over synth or electric tones.
“This is a record that I felt in many ways was missing from my discography. The process of making it was often quiet, and solitary, but it’s also an album that wouldn’t exist without help from some incredibly talented friends (Chris W Ryan, James Vincent McMorrow, SOAK, Hugo White, Carey Willets). It’s an album that brought me great solace and peace in writing it. I hope it can do the same for whoever needs it…I made nearly every big decision about this album and these songs walking along Ventry beach in West Kerry. Releasing it today feels in a way like watching a wave break and be pulled back into the sea. A cycle completing.”
Sorcha Richardson
LIVE:
25th Oct – Aiteall Festival, Bantry, IRE
4th Nov – Belfast Empire Music Hall, Belfast, UK
5th Nov – Gleneagle INEC, Poulnamucky, IRE
6th Nov – The Academy, Dublin, IRE
8th Nov – Savoy Club and Venue, Cork, IRE
10th Nov – Hoxton Hall, London, UK
12th Nov – The Lodge at Deaf Institute, Manchester, UK
Gurriers – Nobody’s Coming To Save You
The Dublin band Gurriers‘ second album builds on them having become one of the most talked-about acts in the current wave of Irish post-punk and who would readily cite Gilla Band as an inspiration.
Released on Play It Again Sam and recorded between Attica Studios in Donegal and London’s Holy Mountain with producers Mark Bowen of Idles and Loren Humphrey (Geese, Automatic, Westside Cowboy), Nobody’s Coming To Save You soups up everything that made their debut album a going concern.
Its four singles chart the album’s dynamics: the title track reframes an apparently hopeless refrain as a call to collective action, ‘Party Lines’ aims its dance-punk at political hypocrisy, written as the war in Sudan escalated, the Samuel-Beckett ‘Nothing Happens Twice’ keeps the momentum high, while the slowest of the four, ‘Pins’, turns reflective, dwelling on mortality and the things left undone.
Nobody’s Coming To Save You leaves an impression of lyricist Dan Hoff trying to find meaning, instil purpose and reach understanding as a complicated world makes him rise to a shout to match its tone, represented by the band’s fiery arrangements, which tend to be caustic and heat-blasted. Gurriers run on fumes of disillusion.
Upcoming gigs:
- Wednesday October 28th – Belfast, Ulster Hall (with Enola Gay)
- Thursday October 29th – Dublin, Vicar Street (with Enola Gay)
- Sunday November 1st – Dublin, 3Olympia Theatre (with Child Of Prague)
Sylvan Esso – Ow ∞
The North Carolina duo of Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn’, and their first album in four years was reworked and revisited nearly every day since 2022, and released on their own Psychic Hotline label, Ow ∞ is their most expansive record yet, built with a small army of collaborators and led by the single ‘Concrete Glen’, which weaves in a sample of Sigur Rós. The band describe it as a trust fall into a dystopian present, messy, immediate and full of feeling.
Empress Of – Dream House
Empress Of, the Los Angeles-based producer and singer Lorely Rodriguez’s bilingual, emotionally raw electropop is one of the most consistent discographies in alt-pop. Dream House takes its cue from the LA Wildfires of 2025 which destroyed the Rodriguez family home.
With the house now rebuilt, the album is a reflection on loss and heartache, informed by such upheaval – with a positive air throughout songs which are preoccupied with the rebuild of their lives. Her mother Reina pops up again as she has on previous albums and Blood Orange and Cecile Believe feature.
![Empress Of - Blue Light (feat. Blood Orange) [Official Visualizer]](https://nialler9.com/wp-content/cache/flying-press/3a0f2df76f001092986787be8c36f839.jpg)
Colin Stetson & Brìghde Chaimbeul – All the light in the world
A collaborative album between the American saxophone powerhouse Colin Stetson and the Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, two musicians who conjure vast, drone-rich soundworlds from breath and circular technique. Hypnotic and elemental, it is a meeting of two singular players.
Strange Boy – Say Nothing
The second, and possibly last, album from Strange Boy, the Limerick rapper whose personal, unflinching writing collides hip-hop with Irish trad. Released this week alongside news that he is taking an indefinite break from music, Say Nothing feels like a fittingly raw and unguarded full stop. Written between 2022 and 2023 and produced by Enda Gallery, Say Nothing is a portrait of Jordan Kelly’s Limerick, through hard times touching on grief, masculinity, persistence, friendships that define him and loss – through the lens of the recurring figure of Nitty, drawn from both his own experience and the lives of people he grew up around.
“It’s a very personal record of my upbringing in Limerick and how that shaped me,” he says. “It was a bit of a free-for-all culture, because there was a lot of violence going around and you didn’t know which way it was going to go. I tried to capture the essence of what I felt the mood of the city was at the time, and balance that with my own personal perspective.” He’s careful to note it’s his Limerick, not the only one, and that a number of people he knew growing up are no longer alive, something a couple of songs address directly.
Sarah Crean – Heirloom
The second album from Brighton-based Irish artist Sarah Crean. Entirely created by women and loosely based on the myth of Calypso, Heirloom uses that story to explore turmoil, life-altering change and the reconciliation that follows. A thoughtful, richly conceived second record.
‘’I started writing this album 3 years ago, during the first few months of a move to London. It began in a studio, with a team of people, until I got dropped by my label and kind of had to start all over again. These 10 tracks have each changed exponentially since I first wrote them, and the final products being produced solely by me feel really special. With the help of an incredible collective of women, I was able to make a record I feel deeply proud of, one that is fully mine”.
“Women and non-binary individuals have created every single piece of Heirloom – every single thing you hear or see. I was fed up being in rooms with solely male musicians, fighting to be listened to, wishing not to be sexualised and undermined. So I resorted to creating the space myself, ones that felt safer and more encouraging of women in music. The idea of making an album about intrinsically female experiences through a female perspective without women at the forefront creatively felt absolutely berserk and almost lazy. I wanted to do it carefully and in the correct way, even if it did take 3 years”.
Son Lux – Out Into
Son Lux arethe endlessly inventive trio best known for their Oscar-nominated score to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Their music fuses experimental electronics, orchestral drama and fractured pop into something genuinely singular, and Out Into is another ambitious dispatch from a band who don’t sit still.
Jam City – My World
The British producer Jack Latham makes music as Jam City. His 2012 debut Classical Curves was a flashpoint for a type of underground electronic music of the time through the label Night Slugs. Latham has since moved through deconstructed club, pop and beyond, right up to 2023’s Jam City Presents EFM, which I loved a lot.
My World is the latest electronic pop-centred turn from a restless, forward-thinking artist, with regular vocal collaborator Aidan returning alongside Hannah Yadi, Solv and more.
Boy Harsher – Get Mean
Boy Harsher are the American duo whose sleek, cinematic darkwave pairs pulsing synths with Jae Matthews’ breathy menace. They sharpen and brighten their sound significantly on Get Mean, drawing on another side of ’80s electro and synth music – recalling New Order and Billy Idol in the process.
Last Apollo – I’ll Walk Towards You
The short six-track debut album from Last Apollo, the project of Lucy Rice, shaped over three years after Rice moved to London in the wake of her bandmates relocating and a first real heartbreak, and built out live with a chamber orchestra, I’ll Walk Towards You serves as an ambitious arrival of this Irish chamber pop indie emotional songwriter.
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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.
