Radie Peat of Øxn: ‘I love murder ballads. I’m not mad about the fact it’s always men murdering women’

The wind was howling, the night stealing in. Surrounded by stone and shadow, Radie Peat and Katie Kim felt as if they were at the end of the world. It was January 6th, 2021: Nollaig na mBan and the beginning of the second year of the pandemic. In a 19th-century Martello tower in Dalkey, overlooking the smudged arc of Dublin Bay, the songwriters and friends were giving voice to demons in a live-streamed performance. Thus was born their new project, Øxn.

“Talking about that time ... the memory of it,” says Peat, who is best known as a quarter of the Mercury-nominated “mutant folk” ensemble Lankum, “it was fertile, a great time musically for us. We were making all this music. In terms of the psychological burdens of lockdowns and stuff, it was all so awful. Very sad and strange. A very weird time.” The genesis of Øxn is bound up with it all, she says.

Everyone was coming out of the woodwork, being, like, ‘Oh, wasn’t Sinéad O’Connor so great?’ A lot of them were exactly the same people who tortured her during her life

—  Radie Peat

A different sort of whirlwind has swirled through Peat’s life recently. Last month she performed at the Mercury music prize ceremony in London with Lankum, who were nominated for their album False Lankum. Six weeks later, Øxn are about to release their debut album, Cyrm (pronounced “sy-rum”). It finds them taking their bows as the first act signed to the storied trad label Claddagh for 18 years.

It has been a busy time, Peat acknowledges from Artane, in north Dublin. The Mercury was an experience, she says – though not one in which she felt particularly at home. “Very music industry. The people who hate the music industry most are musicians. It’s very BBC. By which I mean it is a very slick and well-oiled machine.”

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Øxn are, by design, the opposite of slick and well oiled. Emerging from the fug of Covid, they are an experimental supergroup that, alongside Peat and Kim, also features, as full and equal partners, the singer and drummer Eleanor Myler, from the band Percolator, and the producer John “Spud” Murphy, founder of the Guerrilla Sounds recording studio, in Dublin’s north inner city, who plays with Myler in Percolator.

Pronounced “oxen”, the project is named after the animals – “bovines that have been castrated”, as the group explain. “Something about the story of the beasts appealed to the band,” they say. “Castrated, pulling heavy machinery; out to slog, or an interred beast for milking, since about 4000 BC. Sometimes worshipped, sometimes doomed for domestication.”

With an introduction like that, don’t expect saxophones and house piano. The mood is folk horror meets Krautrock and Celtic folk. Imagine Tangerine Dream soundtracking Midsommar while Enya goes through a doom-metal phase in an adjacent coal bunker.

Anyone who has followed the careers of Kim and Peat would have known a collaboration would be intense. Just how intense was hinted at in October 2020, when they were mystery guests on a live-stream by the woolly-headed trad buckos The Mary Wallopers. Their identities hidden behind baroque masks, the friends performed a grimdark version of the murder ballad Love Henry – the track is a highlight of the new album.

[ The Mary Wallopers: ‘Folk was never supposed to be safe’ ]

“Me and Radie, it was suggested we should work together,” say Kim, a Waterford-born artist who has played with Mike Scott’s Waterboys and received a Choice Music Prize nomination for her 2016 LP, Salt. They had performed together before Covid, with a view to a longer-term collaboration, she explains.

“We started throwing songs into the mix to see if the two of us worked together, if our voices worked well. We found they did kind of work. We kept doing it. And came up with the bones of what this album is. We did a couple of gigs in 2018. And then everyone got on with our lives. I moved to New York. Lankum went on a big tour.”

When Covid struck, Kim flew home. “Myself and Radie were disappointed we weren’t able to do anything with [our collaboration] after the gigs were done. We said, why not get together? Ellie was working with Radie at the time. We got Ellie involved. Organically, Spud got involved. He was in the next room while we were rehearsing in Guerrilla.”

Lankum are a traditional band, more or less, though they layer their music with very contemporary droning effects, so that it sounds as if you’re listening to the Chieftains collaborate with King of Limbs-era Radiohead. A similar sensibility crackles through Øxn, though Peat’s dark and stormy voice has a counterpoint in Kim’s more dulcet style and in the throbbing, shoegaze soundscapes that are signature of Myler’s Percolator.

It’s heavy stuff: as dark, loamy and tangled as freshly ploughed earth, as beautiful and bleak as trees framed by a winter sky. And that’s merely the music. Lyrically, they don’t hold back. Cruel Mother, the album’s first track, updates an 18th-century ballad recalling a time when women having children outside marriage were considered possessed.

The demonisation of women is a theme that surfaces again via a cover of Maija Sofia’s The Wife of Michael Cleary. It retells the story of Bridget Cleary, the last woman in Ireland burned as a witch. (Her husband, later convicted of manslaughter, claimed that he believed she was in consort with the faeries.)

“The addition of the Maija Sofia song about Bridget Cleary, that roots it in Ireland,” says Peat. “The original Katie Kim-Radie Peat gigs, we billed it as a night of musical stories. When we were putting together the songs there was a definitive and deliberate inclusion of those songs with themes of ostracised women, villainised women, that ill-treatment of women in society. That was something we did deliberately do.”

[ The story of the last ‘witch’ burned alive in Ireland ]

She was reminded of the thread of misogyny running through Irish history when Sinéad O’Connor died in July. The late singer was vocal about the demonising of outspoken women, says Peat. “Everyone was coming out of the woodwork, being, like, ‘Oh, wasn’t she so great? Wasn’t she so amazing?’ A lot of them were exactly the same people who tortured her during her life, called her this, that and everything. Trying to suppress what she was saying. We are coming out of whatever dark era that was. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.”

At that Mary Wallopers show in November 2020, they announced themselves to the world with a gothic murder ballad, Henry Lee. The song, sometimes called The Proud Girl or Young Hunting, features on Cyrm, where it inverts the traditional murder ballad, in which a man kills a woman.

Maybe Dublin’s inner city has gone a bit mad. Sure, it’s always been a bit mad. Is that not the charm of the city as well?

—  John 'Spud' Murphy

“I love murder ballads. I’m not mad about the fact it’s always men murdering women,” says Peat. “I always loved this version: it’s the only one where I heard the opposite, where it’s a woman murdering a man.”

Øxn are speaking from Guerrilla, the studio established by Murphy in 2011 and where some of Cyrm was recorded (though the bulk of it was done at Hellfire Studio, in Woodtown, Co Dublin, where Lankum likewise made False Lankum). Emerging from lockdown, there has been a great deal of hysteria about Dublin city centre. As someone who has rooted their artistic life in the area, what has been Murphy’s experience?

“There’s a lot of nonsense in the media about it,” he says. “To be honest, the area we’re in has been gentrified ... I know maybe the inner city has gone a bit mad. Sure, it’s always been a bit mad. Is that not the charm of the city as well?”

As if recording False Lankum and Cyrm back to back weren’t enough, Peat is also a parent to an 18-month-old. It’s been an emotional few years for her: when she thinks back to those original Nollaig na mBan performances, she can’t help but be struck by how much has changed, even as music has remained a constant.

She is proud to have played the Mercury (which was won this year by the London jazz act Ezra Collective). There was, she says, some “pushback” from the BBC over Lankum’s song choice – a forbidding interpretation of the ballad Go Dig My Grave, which alights on the vibe-ruining subject of suicide. Lankum held firm.

“It was a huge achievement to get there. It was mad. I felt like we were representing Ireland. I knew we weren’t going to win. It was very clear ... we were there to do a performance, to represent our album, represent Ireland and then go home with no trophy.”

Cyrm deserves all sorts of accolades, too. But that’s for the future. In the meantime, Øxn are looking forward to bringing the project to a live audience with gigs at the Sugar Club in Dublin around Halloween and, on the eve of the album launch, their first show before a live audience, at the Everyman theatre in Cork.

“We want to see where it goes,” says Kim. “We didn’t have any plans at all to do anything after this. We wanted to get it recorded and be happy with it. Never say never in the future. To be honest, everybody’s so busy with all the other projects that we don’t know. For the time being we’re very happy getting these gigs going.”

Cyrm is released on Friday, October 27th. Øxn play the Everyman, Cork, on Thursday, October 26th, and the Sugar Club, Dublin, on Tuesday, October 31st, and Wednesday, November 1st