Choice Prize: A profile of the 10 nominees for Irish album of the year being announced Thursday
Robbie Cunningham, Oisín McCaffrey, and Ross McNerney have enjoyed unbelievable success since forming in 2022 with the aim of playing covers in pubs. They quit their jobs (teachers and data scientist, respectively) to sign a deal with Warners in 2024, have played all over the world, and basked in three sold-out shows in the 3Arena in December. Oh, and they’ve clocked up over 100m streams after releasing their debut album last May. Like Kingfishr - who’ve enjoyed a similarly rapid ascent - there’s something comfortingly familiar to the likes of and
Emerging out of lockdown as a studio project, singer/guitarist Fatboy, drummer Korey Thomas, and bassist Dara Abdurahman make uber-cool jazz-inflected hip-hop/soul that sounds far removed from the Dublin suburb of Ballymun from where they hail. (“I used to be called a junkie and a ‘knacker’ because I came from the blocks, but I just want to be able to raise my kids here too,” Fatboy told . After a slew of singles and mixtapes, their debut album arrived in 2024. They call a mixtape rather than an album - a politically charged manifesto that laces together Ireland’s bruised past with a fervent hope for the future.
was Joshua Burnside’s fifth studio album in eight years. His sixth, It’s Not Going to Be OK, arrives on March 20. Previously specialising in indie-folk of the Lumineers sphere, he’s very much part of the Irish folk revival - or should we be calling it a golden age at this stage? - of recent years. “This feels like my happiest family of songs to date,” he says of Teeth of Time. “Or the most joy-filled ones anyway… which isn’t much of a boast.” The album was written as Burnside became a father for the first time and he says it reflects on ageing, fatherhood, and getting by, set against a backdrop of environmental decline, social division, and political conflict.
Her third album in as many years - won the Choice Prize in March 2023 - CMAT describes Euro-Country as “the best thing I have ever made”, admitting it felt like the most important record of her career,. The title track is a millennial call-to-arms, while was one of the songs of a glorious summer after going viral off the back of a TikTok dance. Even as she quips during the 5.23-minute that “this is making no sense to the average listener”, the track krautrocks its way into your head. There’s nobody writing sharper, smarter pop songs right now. Hot favourite to take her second Choice Prize.
Thomas O’Donoghue, 22, hails from Galway and, under the moniker Dove Ellis, released debut album last December. Fresh from a support slot with the hottest band of the year, Geese, the record arrived amid a swell of hype (and just two weeks before Choice Prize submissions were due from judges). He has given few interviews, but told Some Other Time he feels oddly detached from the narrative forming around him. “It’s cool, but it’s also very bizarre,” he says. “I feel very separate from it, and because of that it’s kind of funny.” Tracks such as Pale Song and Love Is sound strikingly assured. At the outset of his career, Dove Ellis already seems to have found his voice.
The third album by Kerry artist Ronan Kealy aka Junior Brother begins with an off-kilter tin whistle summoning. “The sound of the album is supposed to take the organic instruments of Irish traditional music and lift them somewhere else,” he explains, “like the otherworldly Irish music sometimes heard from fairy forts at twilight on country roads, impossible to recreate upon hearing.” Drawing from UCD’s folklore archives, he shapes pipes, drones, flutes, and his singular, incantatory voice into something spectral and unsettling. Themes range from far‑right creep to environmental violence and existential disorientation. The five-minute encapsulates all this and more, while the accompanying video features Cork actor Éanna Hardwicke.
Dundalk five-piece Just Mustard have seen both debut album (2018) and (2022) nominated for the Choice Prize. They are not radically reinventing themselves on third record We Were Just Here. At various points it drifts through shoegaze, dream-pop, post-punk, noise and industrial, though Katie Ball’s hypnotic vocal sits noticeably higher in the mix. The band say the record was inspired by club spaces and physical joy, with the songs striving for immediacy and impact. Favourites of Robert Smith, they will support The Cure at Marlay Park in June.
Based across Cork and Portugal, Pôt-pot are led by Mark Waldron-Hyden, whose demos, made during a period of grief and personal upheaval, form the basis of Warsaw 480km. The album evolved through full‑band live sessions into a motorik, harmonium‑drenched swirl — Elaine Malone’s vocals underpin and accompany Waldron-Hyden throughout. It’s equal parts krautrock propulsion and psychedelic haze, jam-heavy and droning, with shades of fellow Cork outfit the Altered Hours and echoes of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. The result is an exhilarating, immersive blast.
Galway artist Maria Somerville’s third album - her debut on the legendary 4AD label - sounds like her beloved early morning show on London digital radio station NTS. It feels windswept yet intimate, her voice slipping at points into a whisper, as harps, synths, and reverberant guitars blur into a soft-focus emotional landscape. She found a renewed sense of creative energy upon returning to live in Connemara; it provided fertile ground for free-flowing recording sessions in her small living room studio. As she sings in ‘Trip’, “I can see more clearly than I could before. I know now what’s true for me.”
Beloved of Steve Lamacq and BBC 6 Music, Sprints returned with a second album just 18 months after opens in restraint, Karla Chubb repeating “I used to live here” over distant drums before the slow burn gives way. By the time detonates two minutes in, the tone is set. From there, it rarely loosens its grip. Heavier and more expansive, the record captures a band hardened by relentless touring and line-up change, channelling it all into something taut and urgent.
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- The winner of the RTÉ Choice Music Prize will be announced at a live event in Vicar St, Dublin, on Thursday, March 5
