25 albums of the year: The best of international, Irish, and Cork
Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler
Grandma Death and what comes afterwards is the theme that haunts the third album by the Norfolk electro duo of Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth. Over a suite of buoyant psychedelic pop, Hollingworth reflects on the death, at age 22, of her boyfriend, while the duo also contemplate the fraying of their friendship – with beats you couldn’t help dance to. It’s a hopeful record about dark times that gives off a charming rave energy and is illuminated with irreverent humour.
After burning out on the success of her previous record, Japanese-American artist Mitski Miyawaki wanted to walk away from her burgeoning indie celebrity. She hasn’t quite achieved that. Instead, she’d plunged back into the madness headfirst with a blistering sixth record that holds fame at arm's length even as Mitski’s steam-rolling mix of Kate Bush and Bjork wins an even wider audience – including Harry Styles, who brought her on tour. A headline date at Vicar Street, Dublin in April confirmed her stardom: dancing, wailing and tumbling in a heap she held the audience entranced.
Underground star Charli has described Crash as her last big “commercial” record (it brings down the curtains on her major label deal with Warners). If this is goodbye, then what a way to say farewell. It is one of Charli’s most thumpingly solid yet: yet an album about falling in and out of love that brings a left-of-centre perspective to anthemic pop. Charli – real name Charlotte Aitchison – is synonymous with the manic “hyperpop” sound. Crash, though, is punter-friendly, with choruses that go off like fireworks.
Rapper Lamar’s fourth album was widely praised on release and then suffered a backlash as the internet cast a quizzical glance at those wall-to-wall five-star reviews and wondered if critics were gushing a little too much. But no – with hindsight, it is clear that this meditation on fame and how it chips away at your soul is potentially Lamar’s masterpiece. He also followed it up with a flourish. The Big Steppers tour he brought to Dublin in November was a mind-bending tour-de-force. Highlights included avant-garde dancing, a mocked-up Covid testing lab and Lamar having a rap battle with a puppet carved in his likeness. It was a not-in-Kansas moment with bells on.
The Corrs, Shania Twain and Charli XCX are chucked into the blender – sometimes throughout the same song – in this triumphant second record from the British Japanese singer. Sawayama has some serious things to discuss: the LP is about making peace with the parents whom you feel have done you wrong. But along with the angst, it’s great fun, with big hooky songs that aren’t afraid to let down their hair. Sawayama’s only getting started too: see her next year acting opposite Keanu Reeves in John Wick 4
Aged just 23, with her second album Mikaela Strauss, aka King Princess, confirms herself to be an old soul trying to make sense of a world moving at 1000 kmph. Written between sessions playing Ghost of Tsushima on Playstation, Hold On Baby sees Strauss reflecting on her thoroughly wholesome relationship with her girlfriend and wondering if contentment is its kind of trap – all wrapped up in magnificent vast and keening torch songs.
“Songs… that should have some emotional sentiment – but make it fab” is how Blane Muise, aka London singer, rapper and producer Shygirl, defines her sound. ‘Fab’ is one word for her debut, where her punchy rhyming is paired with subterranean production and depth-charge grooves. It’s a richly sparse affair – an album that draws you in relentlessly, revealing fresh secrets with every listen.
Davachi's October concert at the Unitarian Church in Dublin was a stunning exercise in minimalism – a feat that the Canadian pianist and organist replicate on this haunting LP, recorded on an 18th-century pipe organ and utilising mezzo-soprano and contralto vocals. It defies genre but whatever it is, it is impossible not to be floored by the project’s ghostly ache.
Swift’s best yet? It is certainly her most vulnerable with songs that question the meaning of being Taylor Swift, all wrapped up in fuzzy wee hours production, courtesy of her long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff. Swift has shifted through the gears across the past several years, from the dayglo pop of Lover to the thrilling faux indie-isms of Folklore and Evermore. Midnights is something else: more fraught and angst-ridden than anything she has previously recorded – and yet monstrously catchy, too.
Maximalist indie rock from Brighton-based Dana Margolin that takes the Coldplay more-is-more stadium formula and upends a bucket of trauma over it. There are ballads, head-bangers and sing-along anthems – all driven by Margolin’s expressively raw and vulnerable voice. You won’t encounter a finer indie record.
The Dundalk band have hailed as heirs to “shoe-gaze” pioneers My Bloody Valentine. But on their second album, they move past such comparisons with songs that combine the woozy drift of the Cocteau Twins with the angry thump of Nirvana.
Caterwauling guitars are refashioned into a thing of beauty by Ireland’s most overwrought and magnificent four-piece. Pummelling chaos is the baseline register here, but amid the howling guitars are fragments of grace and vulnerability. The Dubliners are on course to become the most inventive guitar band since Sonic Youth, with music in which ugliness and elegance are revealed to the flip sides of the same coin.
Eerie folk pop from a Wicklow artist whose dreamy ballads seem to inhabit a dimension adjacent to our own.
PJ Harvey meets beat poetry as Limerick artist O’Brien – previously a high-end fashion designer – delivers a whipsmart debut. She’s a poet who talks the talk, even as she walks the walk.
Recorded through lockdown in Clare, Frances's second record has the wild beauty of wind coming in off the Atlantic seaboard. Seeking refuge from the pandemic in rural tranquillity, and then pouring the insights gained on to a record, has quickly become one of pop’s most tiresome cliches. Frances takes that formula and spins it into deeply moving new shapes.
Kerry actress Buckley teams up with former Suede guitarist Butler for a collection of gothic folk songs – and received a Mercury Prize nomination for her effort. What’s perhaps most impressive is the project’s lack of starriness. Buckley can sing – but she isn’t afraid to come across as menacing and darkly otherworldly on a project that feels like a companion piece to her Alex Garland-directed folk horror curio, Men. Butler, ever the wallflower, basks in the magnificent weirdness of it all.
A sparkling 32-minute piano fugue, recorded at the Model art centre in Sligo and inspired by the musician’s cat: “a beautiful dancer who excelled at twirls and leaps into the air.”. With this project, Beylis, guitarist with “folk horror” psychedelic trio Woven Skull, showed she can do quiet and effervescent as stunningly as she does mind-bending rock with her band.
Sublime chill-out pop from Korea-based Dublin producer that marries East and West. “Embraced by the warmth of the rain, glimpses of the past flood your mind, transporting you to a place beyond time,” is how he describes the record - which makes it sound like the pop equivalent of Studio Ghibli meets Elden Ring. True to that pledge this is a transportive collection that opens the portal to another world.
Twin drummers power Thumper’s effervescent punk-pop on an LP that suggests a thrillingly miserable Blink182 . Thumper are more than Dublin scenester darlings: Delusions of Grandeur is a debut to cherish.
Fontaines’s best album and their first number one sees their song-craft coming on in strides. They’ve also weaned themselves off their hackneyed obsession with “rare aul’ times” Dublin – an affectation that has evaporated since they relocated to London. There are pop songs (Jackie Down The Line) and baroque prog rock (the incredible Nabokov – which clocks in at over five minutes but which feels it should go on for longer).
Released following the tragic death of Fatima Mansions/Microdisney singer Cathal Coughlan at age 61, this upbeat collection has cameos from former Microdisney guitarist Sean O’Hagan and Will Sergeant of Echo and the Bunnymen. It is a fitting testament to Coughlan and credit must go to his Telefís musical foil, Garrett ‘Jacknife’ Lee, for persevering following Coughlan’s passing and putting the record out into the world.
Away from her five-piece band The Altered Hours, Dripsey-based Howley gave us her lockdown record, a magnificent treatise on self-belief, isolation and the healing power of music. It was steeped in minimalism – and yet, what a punch it picked.
Slower, more contemplative than its follow-up, this was a thoughtful calling card from Coughlan and Lee – a meditation on Irishness as examined through the prism of Sixties and Seventies popular TV. “The Ireland of the 1960s was so different to where anywhere is like now, including Ireland. It’s almost exotic to investigate it,” Coughlan, a native of Glounthaune in East Cork, told the Examiner in January. “It was quite monochrome. But, as with a lot of monochrome imagery, it’s hiding a multitude.”
Rollicking punk rock delivered with a wink and a scowl from the Cork three-piece. The EP was part of a fruitful year for the group, who toured with Kim Gordon, previously of Sonic Youth, and produced a compelling documentary about Cork’s rich punk heritage, Leeside Creatures
Strictly speaking, former Redneck Manifesto keyboardist Neil O’Connor is from Dublin. However, his latest project is steeped in Cork’s musical heritage, as he reinterprets the iconic mid-20th century soundscapes of composer Seán Ó Riada.
