There’s so little mystery in music nowadays that it’s hard to know how to respond when a genuine enigma does emerge – all the more so when it’s in the guise of a rumpled Galway songwriter who sounds like a storm-tossed mix of Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Jeff Buckley.
Little information is publicly available about Dove Ellis beyond the facts that he’s from the west of Ireland, is based in Manchester and has performed at the Windmill venue in south London – plus that his debut album arrives on the back of his supporting Geese, the American indie band of the moment, around the United States.
Ellis released Blizzard not long before Christmas. In other circumstances it might easily have slipped between the cracks. Yet this is such a striking album that it’s proving impossible to ignore – and was followed by a stunning turn at the Other Voices festival in Dingle.
If you have a minute, Google it. The power of live music doesn’t always translate to the screen, but there’s something magisterial about the way Ellis commands the stage. Equally notable is that he has little apparent interest in playing to the audience. The concert starts with a shrug and ends with a slouch, yet in between is an onslaught of angst and anxiety.
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International audiences have picked up on the parallels with Buckley and Radiohead – the interplay between the fretful falsetto and tunes that build and build and then burst like a dam consumed by a deluge.
He is audibly an Irish artist too, however. You can hear in the intensity of his work echoes of Mic Christopher and of Fergus O’Farrell of Interference – artists who died young but who, had life proceeded differently, might have been huge stars.
Ellis may yet eclipse them. He has certainly released one of the most arresting LPs of 2025. It begins with the bare-boned strum of Little Left Hope, a track that unfolds like a sort of purgatorial Paul Simon before opening into a banshee-wail chorus.
He then goes full Radiohead on Pale Song, a sort of desolate younger sibling of Fake Plastic Trees that has the bleak majesty of desolate Irish skies stretching miserably to the horizon.
There are surprises amid the gloom. A folksy energy illuminates Jaundice, which surfs waves of sheer bliss, while It Is a Blizzard suggests a meeting of Beirut, Zach Condon’s spectral indie project, and Adrian Crowley, another songwriter from Galway whose music is illuminated by an electrifying sense of wonder.
Although Ellis seems not to give interviews, according to the internet he was born around 2002. Oddly, there’s something specifically 1990s about him. It’s there in the grungy spikiness of even his softest moments and also in the way that the music makes no concessions to the dithering listener.
Blizzard isn’t tailored for Spotify or for headlining the next festival brought to you by an international conglomerate. It’s vulnerable yet threaded through with something glowering and almost menacing. There are sweet songs here, yet there is never a second when they’re less than haunting.
Tumultuous and arresting, Blizzard arrives amid a bleak midwinter for singer-songwriters. The genre has moved away from its homespun roots and lately been dominated by schmaltzy unit-shifters such as Ed Sheeran and boom-stomp foghorns such as Hozier.
Ellis brings the genre right back to the source: it’s as if he has downloaded the spirit of the Dublin venue Whelan’s a quarter-century or more ago and given it a tender Gen Z do-over. This is a beautiful album – but it’s also urgent and stubborn, full of sharp edges and illuminated throughout by a refusal to compromise.
Thank goodness for awkward outsiders, and thank heavens for this luminescent record.
