The 10 best Irish albums of 2023 so far

Gigi’s Recovery

The Murder Capital (Human Season)

“Is this our way to escape? Our way through the gates we built?” These questions are asked by The Murder Capital’s singer and songwriter, James McGovern, in Crying, one of a batch of songs on the band’s second album, which was shaped through the months of lockdown a couple of years ago. To say Gigi’s Recovery is a spiky reaction to their 2019 debut, When I Have Fears (a merciless statement on grief and loss), is an understatement. Despite the searing sonic quality on display, optimism bubbles under the surface of the songs, not least on the closing acoustic track, Exist, wherein McGovern uncovers a curious kind of salvation: “This morning I took ownership ... to stay forever in my skin.” It’s that kind of album – a start-to-finish listening experience that McGovern told The Irish Times at the start of this year was by no means a dying art form. “I think it’s important to many people out there ... We pushed all the way through to the end and created a record that, hopefully, people can grow with.”

[ The Murder Capital: ‘We just couldn’t talk to each other. Trust was a huge issue’ ]

All of This Is Chance

Lisa O’Neill (Rough Trade)

Now that the outer reaches of Irish folk and trad are being written about farther and wider (in the New York Times, no less), perhaps it’s time that Lisa O’Neill reap the rewards – she has been ploughing a specific kind of furrow for the best part of a decade. In February, fours year after her previous album, Heard a Long Gone Song, All of This Is Chance positioned her at the forefront of this newfound international appraisal. That this album is O’Neill’s best to date is unsurprising – the songs were mostly mulled over during the pandemic, which is possibly why the likes of Old Note, Birdy from Another Realm, The Wild Workings of the Mind, Whisht, and Goodnight World reside in a place between the Stranger Things equivalent of reality and something else altogether.

Until the Rivers Run Dry

John Blek (We Are Rats Recordings)

The strike rate for John Blek’s albums is extraordinarily: the songwriter-singer releases a new one fairly regularly, and each is lauded, justifiably, for its quality. Until the Rivers Run Dry continues the pattern – but with extra twists of class. The thrust of the music is classic pop in style (think Paul McCartney or teen-scream era Scott Walker), but Blek adds singular touches to the mix that invest songs such as Floating Aimlessly, Restless Sea, Once in a While, and Come Undone with a graciousness that sometimes takes your breath away. The cherry on top? Most of the album features delicate strings by Colm Mac Con Iomaire and additional vocals from Cathy Davey. A match made in heaven.

Endless Affair

Ailbhe Reddy (MRNK UK)

There she is on the album cover – Ailbhe Reddy at her own party, looking forlorn and removed from the chatter of those around her. The sense of dislocation is obvious, as is Reddy the clinical observer of people’s lives. She released her debut album, Personal History, bang in the middle of the pandemic, so was unable to extend the reach of that album’s songs beyond streaming platforms and occasional radio play. Endless Affair should make up for that, with tunes that veer from scorching indie guitar pop (Shitshow, Shoulder Blades) to the more reflective (Pray for Me, Motherhood, Good Time). Each style will have you whistling until your mouth is dry.

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False Lankum

Lankum (Rough Trade)

Lankum’s fourth album, bookended by the tracks Go Dig My Grave (eight minutes) and The Turn (13 minutes), is not, as Mojo’s reviewer grandiosely stated, the OK Computer or Dark Side of the Moon of traditional Irish music. It is, however, a milestone in that it takes those receptive to sonic altered states to a different, more delirious place. As the subject matter – suicide, treachery, despair, failure – resides in watery graves, the music navigates a route between balladry (Newcastle, Lord Abore and Mary Flynn, On a Monday Morning), concertina-crash-ensemble (Master Crowley’s) and something it’s nigh on impossible, or perhaps unwise, to put your finger on (The Turn). Such categorisation, Ian Lynch of the band told The Irish Times, is inevitable but perhaps unnecessary. “Sometimes people refer to us as folk or folk punk, but we’re not. We’re not claiming that this is traditional or folk. It’s just its own thing. It’s music.”

[ Lankum: ‘Singing with other people, in harmony, is a lovely experience because it releases some mad chemical in your brain’ ]

Speaking from Other Rooms

Perlee (Greenbay/Backseat)

Cormac O’Keefe and Saramai Leech have history when it comes to writing and presenting music, but their combined efforts on Perlee’s debut album – written and recorded in Berlin, where they decamped from Co Meath a few years ago – transcends any of their previous work. O’Keefe and Leech may wear their mutually inclusive influences too close to their hearts, but the outcome is the making of beautiful music too difficult to walk away from. Those influences? Hints of Radiohead, Beach House, And So I Watch You from Afar, The Blue Nile, Mogwai, and Cocteau Twins reveal themselves here, but the clincher isn’t so much in what Perlee like to listen to as how they distil it and conjure up what amounts to slow-motion-roller-coaster dream-pop songs.

Shadow Dance

Daniel Luke (self-released)

Daniel Luke once pounded the drums for the Dublin band Gypsies on the Autobahn, but an irksome voice in his head kept telling him he should swap skin for ivory and sticks for fingers. The outcome of such a change in Luke’s creative make-up is Shadow Dance, a debut solo album comprising instrumental piano pieces that reference classical composers such as Debussy, Chopin and Satie, plus the jazz composers and pianists Bill Evans and Chick Corea (especially his early-1970s Piano Improvisations Vol 1 and 2 albums). Luke’s poised sensibilities are equal parts elegant, sublime earworms and subtle emotional communiques. The album’s “niche neoclassical piano tracks aren’t going to be played on mainstream, daytime radio,” he says, knowing well that the goal isn’t to have a hit record but to make a mark elsewhere: in the heart and the soul.

[ Daniel Luke: ‘When we decided we wanted to do music seriously there was no question of getting a real job’ ]

Fathoms

Stephen Shannon (251 Recordings)

The producer Stephen Shannon is Usually found beside, behind or under a sound desk, as the go-to pair of ears if your band is looking for sonic textures. He has released music before as part of Mount Alaska, Halfset and Strands, but Fathoms is the first under his own name. Such confidence is well served by the music, which is assisted by members of Crash Ensemble and presented as a series of supremely tuneful soundscapes that wistfully evaluate loss and disorder. Reference points for those who require guidance? Look towards Kraftwerk, Ólafur Arnalds and Ryuichi Sakamoto and you won’t go too far wrong.

Greater Than or Equal to the Bonk

The Bonk (ThirtyThree-45)

“A band playing music to the end of its tether,” it says on The Bonk’s Bandcamp page. It’s a description that matches the music to a tee. People with very long memories or comprehensive record collections that veer towards 1970s experimentation will know exactly where The Bonk are coming from and heading to. The template (as such) for the former O Emperor songwriter Phil Christie is rooted in nominally anti-commercial groups such as Henry Cow, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Robert Wyatt, but if that sounds wilfully alternative, fear not: Christie weaves melodies every which way, with the results coming very close to the missing link between out-there and in-your-face.

Chaos for the Fly

Grian Chatten (Partisan)

We’re used to Fontaines DC throwing a few curveballs our way. That continues with their lead singer, Grian Chatten, whose debut solo album distances itself from the band’s scratchy guitars and wall-of-sound unruliness. Mostly acoustic (veering from nods to Elliott Smith to postpunk takes on Simon and Garfunkel), and imbued with ruminations on relationships, music-industry hangers-on and small-town life, the album has no embellishments, no airs and graces, no wild experimentations, just sparse and beautiful songs presented in natural states of creative undress. “I don’t have any desire to reach for the stars or charts or anything like that,” Chatten told The Irish Times a few weeks ago. “I made this record because I feel like I have more of myself to say and to give. I probably will always feel like that, but I like the idea of casting a little light out into the darkness and seeing if anyone grabs on to it.”

[ Grian Chatten: ‘I only started to realise over the last couple years that I was quite weird in school’ ]