The Altered Hours: The Altered Hours (Pizza Pizza) ★★★☆☆
When The Altered Houses recorded their self-titled third album, the Cork group decided “to let the songs fall where they may and let the band rip without too much thought”. Referencing work by Bob Dylan (Desire) and Lucinda Williams (Car Wheels on the Gravel Road), the live-in-studio aesthetic underlines terrific songs such as Lay There With You, Too Much Too Late, Heavy Red Blossom and We’re the Same. A decidedly unforced flair runs throughout, with scratchy dust-bowl twangs, languid blues guitar lines and woozy blends of Pixies and Radiohead tying it all up in a gritty package.
Anamoe Drive: Thank God It’s Friday (Anamoe Drive) ★★★☆☆
When Oisín Leahy Furlong isn’t stalking stages, backed by a maelstrom of drums and guitars, and shouting out words as the lead singer of Thumper, he is writing concise indie-folk songs. The Dubliner’s second solo album is a significant advance on Breakfast in Bed, his debut, from 2024. Each is steeped in the sonic palettes we’re familiar with from the likes of Fionn Regan and Elliott Smith, but what marks out Thank God It’s Friday is its sense of tidiness. From arrangements and choruses to intros and outros, nothing is here that shouldn’t be.
Niyl: Parish Is Burning (Niyl) ★★★☆☆
Considerable thought has gone into Parish Is Burning. “A personal exorcism and a collective prayer” is how the Limerick songwriter Niyl describes his debut album, and he isn’t wrong. Over two years, Niyl and his creative partner and producer, Chris Bubenzer of Diffusion Lab (who has also worked with artists such as Soulé, Jafaris and The X Collective), have laboured over widescreen soul and pop songs that link the passing of time with the emergence of identity and personal depth. The outcome is smart, inspiring and defiant.
The Wicc: Lycanthropy – The Wolf Chronicles Part II (self-released) ★★★★☆
This is “a work of quiet violence”, according to The Wicc, aka the Wexford-based musician Carol Keogh, formerly of The Plague Monkeys, The Tycho Brahe and Autamata. Her solo work has been consistently overlooked, but it is, by any measure, world-class. Lycanthropy explores gender-based predatory behaviour, social-media-driven instability, and the general sense of disquiet that goes with living in troubled times. Excellent songs such as The Raven, Making Strange, A Girl Remembered, Wayward and Down in the Village are topped with the cream of Keogh’s voice. (This album is initially being released only on Bandcamp; a companion set of short stories that is serialised on Keogh’s Substack will be available as a PDF journal.)
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Hilary Woods: Night Criú (Sacred Bones Records) ★★★★☆
“Each record is a lifebuoy, a snapshot, a marker in the sand, a date that requires me to meet it,” says Hilary Woods, one of Ireland’s most steadfast under-the-radar songwriters and musicians, whose days as a sleek rock-star bassist in the Irish post-Britpop contenders JJ72 are long behind her. Woods’s subsequent ventures into ambient, electronic, drone and darkwave have marked her out as a doggedly experimental artist. Such pigeonholing does her elegant work a disservice, however. Night Criú is her first song-based album since Birthmarks, in 2020, and although it’s musically stripped back, it teems with dreamy melodies and hushed vocals. It could be Enya here and Jon Hopkins there, except it’s Woods through and through, and it’s really something else.
