Some early Hard Working Class Heroes for your ears

The Hard Working Class Heroes will see you now. For the 12th year in a row, the HWCH festival, which showcases the best in new Irish music, will take more than half-a-dozen venues in the capital for October 1st to 3rd.

Apart from the night-time gigs, there will also be a plethora of sideshows and extras including city-wide daytime shows and a music conference.

But the real focus is, as it should be, on the 100 acts playing their socks off. But before that all kicks off, here are five acts playing at HWCH that you should start listening to straight away.

Basciville
Wexford siblings Cillian and Lorcan Byrne mine blues, folk, soul and classic rock terrain in search of new nuggets. And yes, we've spelled that correctly.

Pleasure Beach
Belfast five-piece playing anthemic big-room pop with considerable swagger judging by debut single Go.

Saint Sister
Vocalist Morgan MacIntyre and harpist Gemma Doherty have plenty of spooky, folky, full-bodied, deliciously melodic songs.

Talos
Going by a recent batch of new songs, Eoin French's dreamy pop and elegant electronica is shaping up to quite an attraction.

We Raise Bears
Conor Miley and Sharon Murphy's melodic, dashing alt-folk is the kind of ursine takeover we can all agree on.