Rosie Carney: Doomsday… Don’t Leave Me Here (cool0nline x Ultra Records) ★★★★☆
Over the past eight years Rosie Carney has explored both folk (the sparse, vulnerable Bare, her debut album, from 2019) and rock/pop (the compelling I Wanna Feel Happy, from 2022) and, between those, released one of the best tribute albums of recent times (her inspired track-by-track version of Radiohead’s The Bends). With album titles signposting unambiguous song topics, the Co Donegal-based singer presents personal issues in equally clear-cut fashion. Written and produced with Ross McDonald of The 1975, these songs draw from electropop, smartly skewed folk-pop and shoegaze, but the voice throughout – always assertive, occasionally incensed – belongs to Carney.
Cypress, Mine!: Pulling All the Clouds Apart (Self-Released) ★★★☆☆
The itch that continues to be scratched makes its presence felt in Pulling All the Clouds Apart, Cypress, Mine!’s much-delayed follow-up – “that difficult second album,” their lead singer, Ciarán Ó Tuama, deadpans – to their 1987 debut, Exit Trashtown. As one might expect, 38 years of life experience – including physical and mental endurance, love, loss and the vagaries of existence – fuel the narratives, but what remains familiar, albeit more advanced, is the Cork band’s knack for quality pop/rock. Songs such as Smithereen, California Céilí Band and Safe Highway (based on a poem by Ó Tuama’s father, Seán, a former professor of Irish literature at University College Cork) easily answer the question of whether old dogs can be taught new tricks.
Keeley: Girl on the Edge of the World (Definitive Gaze) ★★★★☆
Perhaps not every fan of Keeley Moss’s music will buy into the Dublin songwriter’s mission to memorialise the teenage German backpacker Inga Maria Hauser, whose murder in Northern Ireland in 1988 remains unsolved. But Keeley’s third album contains enough vivid psyche-rock/shoegaze bangers to trigger an early Guy Fawkes night. Yes, Hauser’s tragically short life is honoured, but the core appeal is a batch of songs that capture what Moss terms “the sonic swirl” that has been threatening to bring the band to a far greater audience. From threat to promise? Job done.
Pilgrims: Wintering (Kick the Tyre) ★★★★☆
Paul Noonan and Brian Crosby, former bandmates in Bell X1, have reconnected after 16 years with remarkable results. Noonan has always been creatively peripatetic, hopping from Bell X1 to side projects such as Printer Clips and Houseplants, and to solo work, while Crosby has forged a more solitary creative career as a composer for film and television, first in Berlin, now in rural Co Wicklow. They have reconvened in the best possible way, taking advantage of their respective skills to formulate nine songs that are as close to aural trembling as anything you’ve heard. Noonan’s lyrics are beautifully contained, his singing low-key but raspy; Crosby’s accompanying solemn piano instrumentals are sheer bliss. An early contender for Irish album of the year.
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Thumper: Sleeping with the Light On (Thumper) ★★★☆☆
Very few bands pack as vicious a punch as Thumper. On the band’s second album, the jump cuts of The Rip, Bad Mood, My New Blade, The Drip and You Didn’t Hear This from Me pounce on you in the way that only the best hard-rock songs do. When they stretch out, as they do on the 10-minute riffage of Middle Management, the result is mesmerising. No one is reinventing the wheel, but the songs hum with such tightly wound dynamics that you’re almost gripping the sides of your seat as you listen.
