Best of 2023 | Best albums | Best songs | Irish albums | Best Of Podcasts | Guest lists |
Una Mullally is an Irish journalist, writer and broadcaster from Dublin who has recently had writing in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Cut, BBC, CNN, more.
Una is a weekly columnist for the Irish Times where she write a weekly column on society, politics as well as arts and culture, with a particular focus on music.
After much self-deliberation…
I’ve chosen a selection of songs from Irish artists in what was one of the most stimulating, invigorating years for Irish music in recent history, and perhaps ever. While I could have gone beyond Ireland’s shores for this list, all of these tunes as well as their creators already have, and so these are the songs that have stayed with me throughout 2023.
Lankum
Master Crowley’s
I struggled with selecting a track from False Lankum, which like so many people, is my album of the year. It’s a record that is to traditional music what In Utero was to grunge. It blew everything open. Considering how core Radie Peat’s voice is to the band and the album, it feels a little bizarre not to select a tune where her voice features centrally, such as ‘Go Dig My Grave’, and yet the recorded performance of this tune is so Peat-driven (along with her sister, Sadhbh, and Cormac Begley). ‘Master Crowley’s’ was definitely the album track I spoke to most people about; endless conversations about its production, energy and sounds, the feelings it evoked and unearthed, and the all-round excitement bordering on terror that overcame me when I first heard it. It’s an awesome track in the truest sense of that word.
Lankum’s version of ‘Master Crowley’s’ is also a strange conjuring of something unspoken but felt. There are points in it where I almost lose myself and fall into some sort of trance. The mind goes to black wandering through various apocalyptic scenarios; there are monsters coming out from the earth! Bog bodies are going to escape from the National Museum and go Godzilla all over Dublin! The sea gods are angry! The world is ending! The world is beginning! The stone walls are crumbling! I for one welcome our new heron overlords!
The song embarks upon an almost complete collapse around three-and-a-half minutes in, which at that point feels as though the tune itself has spilled out into a world the very crust of which is being sawn open. It becomes terrifying. Yet somewhere from that abyss, the tune re-emerges, scrambling up a sonic cliff, cloaked in mist having washed up on the ninth wave, to reach its conclusion.
I can’t really explain why this song feels to me like a warning, but I suppose it’s the frenetic pace, the frequencies that simultaneously induce and release anxiety, and its evocation of collapse and regeneration. The entire thing is a disorientating, invigorating trip. How can one song contain the multitudes of a discombobulating freak-out while maintaining its cohesion? Only Lankum know.
Kojaque
Heaven Shouldn’t Have You
Following the brilliant bombardment of Town’s Dead, Phantom of the Afters is a remarkably subtle but incredibly rich progression. The album is Kojaque’s best work. Lyrically, this closing track encapsulates the level of vulnerability and openness that marks this album out as a wonderfully liberated and tense piece of art. “Should I be so candid?” Kojaque asks, an almost ironic hypothetical at the conclusion of an album that writes its honesty in neon. This is a stunning song; tender, probing, reflective, soft in all the right places. Never has deflation sounded so grounded, something that creates an emotional equilibrium throughout.
Infusing the song with Sammy Copley’s gorgeous paean to home is a stroke of genius. A meditation on family, emigration, grief, self-actualisation, and Ireland’s national characteristic that declares “leaving’s in my bones”, it’s a slice of pure beauty.
Cormac Begley
To War
I’m not sure if anyone had Begley becoming a TikTok star on their 2023 bingo list, but that happened, and this was the tune that did it. This jig has all the bass, breath, and urgency that has come to define contemporary traditional music, itself an oxymoron that is playing out with brilliant results across the island and beyond.
It also solidifies the idea that Begley is as much a percussionist as anything else, stretching a free-reed instrument’s realm and ushering it towards a plain he’s expanding as he plays. Every part of the tool is used – bellows, buttons, retractions of air, the sounds he wrestles and urges from it – and then there’s the tune itself. It took one minute and 39 seconds to shatter the preconceptions of what a jig played on a concertina could really be. In the Irish creative sphere, Begley has as much in common with the avant-garde, radical, genre-bending and practice-shattering approaches deeply rooted to ancestral legacy and craft of Dorothy Cross, Olwen Fouéré, and Michael Keegan-Dolan, as he does with any of his musical contemporaries.
Jazzy
Giving Me
This tune feels like such a Dublin classic already that it’s hard to believe it was only officially released this year.
In a world of contrived vocal performances, Yasmine Byrne’s almost languid approach is incredibly refreshing. The familiar production that leans unselfconsciously into sonic moments – expertly referential and alluding to so many massive dance bangers of the past – shrouds the entire thing with a brilliant clarity. The whole song is a mic drop.
Just when you think the obvious vocal choice would be to hammer something home, Jazzy leans back with a simple “da da da”, bridging the title hooks with what feels like a knowing, teasing effortlessness. But if it was easy to create perfect slices of Irish pop-house, everyone would be doing it. It isn’t. And yet, ‘Giving Me’ is exactly what that sounds like: perfect.
John Francis Flynn
Mole in the Ground
There’s something Flynn does with momentum within songs that pulls the listener through them as much as along with them. How does he do that so brilliantly here, on what for me is the best track on his perfect second album, Look Over the Wall, See the Sky?
Maybe it’s the low locomotive rumble and resonance of his voice. Perhaps it’s his capacity to reinvent what exists with new shapes and forms. Potentially it’s an enthusiasm for experimentation. Mainly it’s a coalescence of a level of respect for the song that also disregards how it appeared before, in order to formulate his own expression of it, reborn.
All of that is helped manifest with woozy strings, the gentle but insistent drive of the drums, and shards of electric guitar shanking the song’s structure. Full and minimalist, delicate and distorted, this is a remarkable take on an old song that is all Flynn, but there are approaches here that also evoke Sun Kil Moon, Laura Viers, and Julius Eastman.
Rachael Lavelle
Big Dreams
Lavelle released one of the best albums of the year, and this closing title track contains within it the entire universe of that record. A paean to existentialism, love and loss, self-care, potential, and release, this is a remarkable song on an album loaded with brilliant moments.
With an incredibly restrained vocal performance that takes flight, the song appears to cut itself free from everything with th§e declaration and perfectly metered pacing of the lyric, “I don’t want to hear about / another hero count me out.” The dual storytellers within it pass the narratives back and forth as though in correspondence. It’s a song to descend into. A work of true wonder.
Comparative references such as Weyes Blood, Joni Mitchell, Beverley Glenn-Copeland, Regina Spektor, Julie Feeney, Cassandra Jenkins, and Laurie Anderson may seem lofty (and abundant!), but this is the terrain Lavelle is traversing.
CMAT
Stay For Something
I was split between including ‘Rent’ – a genuinely incredibly song – or ‘Stay For Something’ on this list. But it’s the latter’s “just can’t do it” crazymad exorcism that occurs live that brings this tune into another strata. The heart, energy, exhaustion, and implosion-to-explosion dynamic CMAT storms through is something else.
On the evening parts of Brooklyn flooded at the end of September, I made my way to Baby’s All Right to see an acoustic show of hers. At the gig, all the moisture in the air and on the ground of the borough seemed to coalesce to form new combo-molecules of rainwater, tears and sweat. Without a band to bolster the tunes – and she has a great band – something else happened. Everything bare was on show, and the architecture of her songs appeared even more sophisticated when exposed.
I know CMAT is playing to big crowds now and the production level of her shows has scaled up. I know people love her stage banter, her image, her social media witticisms, her capacity to turn standard television performances into transportive events. I know her voice is amazing. I know people devour the camp qualities of her connection. I know she’s a star. But amongst this brilliant noise, it’s important not to lose sight of when all of this is stripped back, what a remarkable songwriter she is. The level of craft at play is expert. Her capacity to mine hooks is relentless. The breadth of knowledge she must hold about what makes a song really take off is clearly vast. And yet, in an exhausting contemporary context of hit-hunting, none of what she’s creating feels cynical, contrived, or algorithmic. It’s almost delightfully old school. You cannot fake that. You can’t amplify a persona and just let that do the work of artistic excellence. That’s not what’s happening here. CMAT deserves all the success and praise that she’s garnering and that’s coming her way, not only because she’s likeable, fun and a great performer, but because she’s a brilliant artist who writes and crafts incredibly well.
Sorcha Richardson
Map of Manhattan
Richardson gains acclaim, sure, but she’s also underrated. The hardest way to be heard is to whisper. This track is a great example of how Richardson ushers songs into being rather than merely records them.
There’s something of The National in the subtly of this melody, and how the chorus sidles up to the listener, a totally un-showy approach. Also present is her incredible talent for storytelling, her eye for detail in lyrics, her casual inclusion of characters, and her capacity to wrap all of this complexity into a cohesive thematic structure.
This song has lived within me since the first time I heard it, and came into its own for me when she played Elsewhere in Brooklyn. Maybe my attachment to the song is down to the amount of time I spent in New York this year, but I guess that’s also evidence of the emotional connection Richardson’s songwriting creates, whether a particular tune lands in a specific context or not.
Hozier
Francesca
The most straight up rock song on Hozier’s third album had me in a headlock all year. Sitting somewhere between a fist-of-pure-emotion movie montage torch song, rock anthem, and break-up-grief epic, where else is a song going to go but towards blistering defiance when it opens with “Do you think I’d give up?”
Hozier has experienced yet more huge success this year, and his US touring schedule says a lot about the number of people he reaches. Still though, I think this song is a little slept on. To me, it feels like the third in a trilogy that expresses his penchant for the epic, the first being ‘Take Me To Church’, and the second being ‘Nina Cried Power’. I saw Hozier play some a couple of giant gigs this year – Malahide Castle, and Madison Square Garden – and it’s incredible to watch someone doing exactly what he wants, but at a scale that in the big-show-music-industry is often coloured by what others desire.
This may sound like a bizarre thing to say, but as a power ballad aficionado, I feel this tune has as much in common with Heart as it does Hozier’s love of blues. And let me tell you, people, not only is there nothing wrong with that, it actually makes me love it even more. I also adore its utterly grandiloquent outro, with its evocative shades of bell-tolling, raven-flocking, canon-firing, Ridley Scott-scale sonic cinema.
The Mary Wallopers
The Idler
One of the best live music performances on TV this year was The Mary Wallopers’ brilliant turn for the BBC at Glastonbury, but it’s this nugget of a tune from their latest album, Irish Rock N Roll, that sticks out. It’s the protest song of the year for me, a song that stands strong and sure in its frank potency. More people on this island should listen to it, and live its philosophy.
There are a lot of trad and folk bands connecting in a major way with the Irish diaspora and anyone drawn to this new wave – amongst them, Lankum, The Scratch and Lisa O’Neill (who released one of the albums of the year, and I would have included the remarkable ‘Old Note’ in this list had it not been released in 2022) – but there’s a specific vibe in the crowd at The Mary Wallopers shows outside of Ireland that feels like some sort of strange time machine while also being blisteringly ‘now’. I saw them play a raucous show at Irving Plaza in October, and it’s no surprise to hear increasingly loud comparisons to The Pogues articulated.
See all Guestlist of 2023 choices
Best of 2023 | Best albums | Best songs | Irish albums | Best Of Podcasts | Guest lists |
