Towards the end of writing their second album as Lemoncello, in an 18th-century cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in west Kerry, Claire Kinsella and Laura Quirke had a hair-raising encounter with the local wildlife.
“There was one night where we were trying to take a break and we went for a swim,” Kinsella says. “We were coming back. We had been told that there was a ghost in the cottage next to us. We were driving up towards our house. And there was just this giant hare in the middle of the road, looking out to the sea, ears poised. It was at least three minutes before the hare moved.”
The animal crouched there, ignoring Quirke and Kinsella, gazing out to sea and towards the shadow of Skellig Michael. Unsettling in most circumstances, the encounter took on an extra significance for the pair, who earlier that evening had been chatting about their families’ love of ghost stories and their own fascination as adolescents with the supernatural.
“We were talking about ghosts from when we were teenagers,” says Kinsella, who favourably compares the run-in with the hare to gatecrashing a horror movie. “It’s spooky. It’s got that very ‘horror’, terrifying-can-be-beautiful vibe. It’s like there is something bigger than you.”
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The pair took the experience as an indication they were on the right track during the brainstorming sessions at Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, a restored pre-Famine village at Ballinskelligs that offers residencies to artists.
The music they were working on, which they’ve just released as Perfect Place, was already shaping up to be a ghostly affair: a storm of taut strings, ominous grooves and heartfelt lyrics about break-ups, heartache and the pain of moving on after you have outgrown someone.
It’s a triumphant blend of the ancient and the modern – and confirmation that Lemoncello are among the most important young folk acts in Ireland, a reputation that has already seen them share bills with CMAT and Lisa O’Neill.
Perfect Place is a testament both to their friendship – this is a record they dragged into existence together in the dark of Kerry - but also to the raw honesty of Quirke’s lyrics, which are full of unhappy spirits and painful memories.
On the heartbreaking Meet Me Half Way, for instance, she sings in her matter-of-fact way over a sobbing guitar, appealing to an important person in her life to “meet me halfway … where you’re standing … too far from me?”
Heartache in all its forms is the thread that runs through the LP. On another song, Articulate Animal, Quirke warns another significant person to pay attention not to her words but to how she speaks and holds herself: the messages she sends with her gaze, her body language.
Nodding quietly, Kinsella confirms that the pain of growing apart is a recurring theme of the project. The caveat is that these fractures are not necessarily romantic, and take place against the backdrop of life becoming ever more stressful for artists as rents soar and it becomes ever harder to make a living as a working musician.
“It’s an album that was written over a good few years. In that time there were friendships coming together and drifting apart, romantic love coming together and drifting apart,” Quirke says, who is chipper and friendly.
“Yes, the lyrics can come from one particular instance. Then maybe the next verse is completely different. Sometimes I would really love to know that this song is about this place or this person. It tends to be a reckoning with what I’m learning emotionally with all my relationships at the time.”
Kinsella and Quirke met while studying in Maynooth; they put on early gigs at open-mic nights at the Roost pub, across the road from the town’s university, where they were studying music and languages. They struck up an immediate connection, though musically they are from distinct worlds. Quirke, who is from Borris, Co Carlow, grew up on pop and was obsessed with Taylor Swift throughout her childhood.
“I listened to the radio all the time. I was doing my homework: those pop choruses of the early 2000s imprinted something in my brain. Once I found I was into lyrics, I switched to folk music. Folk gives such space to the lyric.”
This was light years removed from Kinsella, who was surprised to discover that her new collaborator was a recovering Swiftie. “When I first went to Laura’s house, when we first met – I was about 19 – Laura’s desk from when she was a teenager was scribbled with Taylor Swift lyrics. I was maybe a bit more of an indie kid growing up. I was, like, ‘Woah, we’ve had different upbringings. This is so interesting.’”
Lemoncello released their first album in 2024. They were heralded as a fresh new voice in Irish folk, but they also noticed that they tended to be talked about in the context of traditional musicians such as the Mercury Prize nominees Lankum and the Dublin songwriter John Francis Flynn, whom they have met since moving to Dublin.
While fans of those artists, they’re careful to draw a distinction. They’re a folk act in the senses that Quirke’s lyrics tell a story and that the textures of their songs are sometimes stripped down, often to the barest bones.
But they’re not another Lankum, whose music delves into the bogwaters of the Irish psyche. Lemoncello’s influences are more contemporary: alongside the keening vocals and raw, diaristic lyricism, Perfect Place features trip-hop beats and pop choruses.
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“We very much respect the folk tradition. We love it. We grew up with it,” Quirke says. “But we’re not trying to reflect back to ancient storytelling. I can see where people draw that folk line and the storytelling aspect. But, in the musical sensibility, it is sometimes a pop song.”
In Dublin they experience on a daily basis what some consider to be the city’s unofficial war on its creative community – an onslaught of rising rents and spiralling costs of living. These challenges affect everyone, of course: it isn’t just artists who have to worry about rent hikes or whether they’re going to end up commuting from deepest Leinster.
‘What we’re losing is artists; we’re losing a scene, because people can’t live here any more.’
— Claire Kinsella on Dublin
But they believe a city that’s as hostile to the arts as Dublin is becoming is in danger of losing an essential part of its soul.
That was Kinsella’s message when she wrote an opinion piece for Hot Press magazine in 2020. She talked of the challenge of balancing her music career, her work as an Irish teacher and the never-ending struggle to pay rent while hoping your landlord doesn’t decide to sell up.
“I am essentially working three jobs to live here,” she wrote. “I’m an Irish teacher, a full-time master’s student, and spend my evenings and weekends recording, playing gigs and doing admin work for the band, to pursue this work I love.”
Six years later, has anything changed?
“It’s probably gotten worse,” Kinsella says. Beside her, Quirke nods her head in agreement.
“The city is squeezing the life out of musicians,” Kinsella continues. “Everyone is feeling the brunt of it. What I can talk about is my own experience. I’ve definitely, in the past couple of years, felt a sense of being squeezed for everything we have in the city, to the point where it doesn’t feel it can be a home for artists any more. It is becoming so artist-unfriendly.
“Everyone getting preference in houses, it’s the people with the most amount of cash, the Google, the big tech. What we’re losing is artists; we’re losing a scene, because people can’t live here any more. I feel so blessed that I can still live here right now. That is purely based on being really, really lucky with finding somewhere to live.”
Between albums, they took a moment last year to celebrate their love of The Corrs by covering Breathless for a Tourism Ireland St Patrick’s Day video. Often regarded as peddlers of disposable Celtic whimsy, the Dundalk singing siblings have had a rehabilitation in recent years. Breathless was also covered by the hipster favourite Caroline Polachek, who has described it as a long-time favourite. Lemoncello feel likewise.
“I’m not going to call it a guilty pleasure, because it’s a pleasure,” Quirke says. “It’s about accepting that this is just good music. There’s nothing cringe about it. It’s a brilliant song – and very nostalgic for both of us.”
Nostalgia can sometimes feel haunting. The ghosts that inhabit Perfect Place are altogether more modern, yet they combine to cast a spell no less potent. Claire Kinsella and Laura Quirke have made an album that’s a perfect mix of beauty, wonder and quiet awe: a 21st-century ghost story.
Perfect Place is released by Claddagh Records
