Choice Prize: Cmat, Lankum, and other Irish album of the year candidates profiled
Cmat and Lankum are the two favourites for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize on Thursday.
Brit Award nominations, appearances on the beloved Off Menu and Alan Carr’s Life’s a Beach podcasts, sellouts on her EU tour, and a US tour coming up in the next month, not to mention her biggest show to date at Dublin’s Fairview Park in June, Dunboyne artist CMAT’s on top of the world right now. Crazymad, For Me arrived 18 months after the Choice Prize-winning debut album. Maybe there’s nothing as charming as ‘I Wanna be a Cowboy, Baby’ here, but it’s a masterclass in songwriting. She calls it “an abstract break-up album - about what happens when you are still angry about something that happened 10 years ago”. ‘Rent’ sounds like the anthem for a generation, while John Grant offers up a brilliant duet on ‘Where are your Kids Tonight?’. ‘Stay for Something’, meanwhile, claims its place as CMAT’s best song. A sensational album.
Fontaines DC released three albums in three years, while frontman Grian Chatten struck out for his debut solo album during their ‘break’ year in 2023. Chaos for the Fly has all the feel of a sideproject - not helped by how it was written: In hotel rooms on a US tour with Fontaines. It was then recorded in a two-week gap between albums. It sounds disaffected at times, like in the opening line of ‘All of the People’, a rebuke to newfound attention: “You think I’m about you. Well, I’m not.” His voice is still the dividing line, but ultimately it sounds like he needs his Fontaines bandmates back to jolt him into life.
There’s a lot of familiarity to Dublin trad artist John Francis Flynn’s second album. The likes of ‘The Zoological Gardens’, ‘Kitty’, and ‘Dirty Old Town’ - the latter two perhaps more poignant following the death of Shane MacGowan - are old favourites, but just as you settle into them, odd things start happening, mostly courtesy of Flynn’s collaborator Brendan Jenkinson. Flynn says: “This is a trad album, you're in Dublin. And then seeps in the weird, wonky electronics.” Of ‘Dirty Old Town’, he explains: “I wanted to turn it on its head, do a really common song but just completely change the tone of it.” The album title hints at new horizons - you sense John Francis Flynn has only begun to explore them.
Dropped by his label after his ambitious second album Town’s Dead, the concept for this record begins with the character Jackie Dandelion - a malapropism of Fontaines DC’s ‘Jackie Down the Line’. The Dublin rapper channels the well-worn emigrant experience as he brings Jackie to London - indeed the album begins with a chant of “Jackie took the soup”, a reference that dates to the Famine. While it might resonate more with the diaspora, it’s the production that sticks. The Biig Piig-featuring ‘Woof’ is as slick as they come, while ‘Rainy Days’ offers a tender break.
Hailed as album of the year by publications near and far, False Lankum is the longest record of the 10 nominees, but it never feels like that. Radie Peat’s haunting vocal stands along for the opening of ‘Go Dig My Grave’. Almost 70 minutes later, the foursome are chanting: “We’ll find better days, burned to the ground.” It then devolves into five minutes of drone-led noise. So is it a hopeful album, like John Francis Flynn’s? Erm… Radie Peat told the Quietus: “We’ve become a more extreme version of ourselves. The dark bits are literally horror, and the light bits are really, really sweet. The contrast has become heightened.” There is beauty too, though, like on the gorgeous ‘Newcastle’, or the Cormac Mac Diarmada-led ‘Lord Abore and Mary Flynn’.
Perhaps the most idiosyncratic album on the shortlist, Rachael Lavelle takes the millennial malaise, loses it on an elliptical machine, comes for the comedy, but then leaves for the bus. Like she says on the title track, “I have a lot of feelings.” Lavelle is a young woman searching for direction and meaning in a strange world, faced with ads for clean eating and ‘Soft Colour Palettes’. She explains: “I knew what I wanted it to feel like. I wanted it to be pleasing to the ear and have a cinematic element to it.” That’s evidenced by the stunning ‘Night Train’. Lavelle is a singular talent, and if you connect with Big Dreams, it feels like the album cover: A comfort.
The four members of Soda Blonde have been playing together for about half their lives, once you add in their previous band Little Green Cars and have always known their way around a big chorus. Following up 2021’s debut Small Talk, Faye O’Rourke rails against the music industry on opener ‘Midnight Show’. She says she was “questioning whether to submit to it or not”; Soda Blonde are proudly independent. The skittering ‘Boys’ sounds straight out of the 1990s, while ‘Why Die for Danzig’, a commentary on war, showcases a different side. It’s no surprise that O’Rourke says she felt inspired by Sinéad O’Connor.
A five-piece with two members from Cork, the Murder Capital enjoyed a swift rise, culminating in the propulsive debut album When I Have Fears in 2019. Fierce arguments in the studio were had in figuring out their next direction - Gigi’s Recovery is first an interesting listen, as singer James McGovern sounds like he’s working through things on the likes of ‘Crying’: “My love, my luck are chained to me.” But the likes of ‘Return My Head’ are brilliantly catchy, while the slow-build of ‘Ethel’ is compelling. There’s a self-confidence about the Murder Capital that helps them stand out from the crowd.
The loudest album of the list, the Scratch are a four piece grounded in metal circles who delved into folk and trad in the last 10 years. Lockdown sessions helped them find a devoted, disaffected fanbase. Following a couple of releases over the years, James Vincent McMorrow was brought in as producer for Mind Yourself and has helped streamline things. Like the title suggests, the Scratch seek to reassure those who find it “hard to cast a shadow in a box room”. ‘Cheeky Bastard’ and ‘Blaggard’ are heavy slabs of fun, but ‘Shoes’ is the standout, a tender song that touches on a land dispute. The Scratch continue to surprise.
Wicklow-born, Cork-based singer-songwriter Ezra Williams was formerly known as Smoothboi Ezra, and enjoyed some industry hype as a teenager as their songs blew up on Soundcloud about a decade ago. Channelling the likes of US singer-songwriters Soccer Mommy and Boygenius’ Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, Ezra Williams makes bedroom pop that sounds like it was created under the covers. But there’s so much to latch onto, like when they sing on album highlight ‘Deep Routed’: “If it’s what I dream I want, why can’t I let myself have it?” Like Rachael Lavelle, Supernumeraries is another side of millennial angst.
A strong shortlist, but it will be a straight shootout between Lankum and CMAT, who won the Choice Prize last year for debut album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead. Both have won much acclaim abroad. False Lankum has been hailed as trad’s answer to OK Computer, but how can the judges resist CMAT?
2023 was another great year for Irish music. Here are 10 more albums that easily could have made the Choice Prize shortlist.
1. Ailbhe Reddy - Endless Affair
2. Caoilian Sherlock - Teenage Jesus
3. Cian Ducrot - Victory
4. Hozier - Unreal Unearth
5. Jape - Endless Thread
6. Maija Sofia - True Love
7. Lisa O’Neill - All of This is Chance
8. ØXN - ØXN
9. The Cope - Dancer
10. The Mary Wallopers - Irish Rock N Roll
- The Choice Prize will be presented at a live event at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Thursday, March 7. The winner will receive €10,000. A highlights programme will be broadcast on RTÉ2 on Thursday, March 16
