Top 10 Irish Albums of 2025
Photographs by Paul McDermott.
It’s been another incredible year for Irish music. Just outside my Top 10 are a load of fantastic albums worth checking out including: Bren Berry’s In Hope Our Stars Align; Ways of Seeing’s The Inheritance of Fear; Just Mustard’s We Were Just Here; For Those I Love’s Carving the Stone, M(h)aol’s Something Soft; and Rún’s eponymously-titled debut.
Below is my Top 10 (eight records, one cassette and a digital only release), Best Irish Single of 2025 and a few Special Mentions.
Best Irish single of 2025
I Dreamed I Dream
Boyopoisoning EP
Boyopoisoning is the second EP from the “experimental no-wave bitch-punk outfit”. It’s astonishingly good, an uncompromisingly noisy affair, but then anyone familiar with 2023’s Why Say A Lot EP knew that the band weren’t about to transform into pop divas.
Thank fuck for that.
Opening track ‘Crawl’ was one of my favourite tunes of the year. An ominous synth starts things off before bass and drums join the fray, the overdriven guitar that comes blaring out of the speakers at the chorus, around the one minute and thirty five second mark, is just glorious. The screamed, “Ow, ow, ow” before the third chorus and the return of that distorted guitar is the absolute icing. It’s just fantastic.
|f Cliffords and Cardinals are the pop yin of the current crop of Cork bands, then Pebbledash, Pretty Happy and I Dreamed I Dream are its anti-pop yang. It takes all kinds to make a city.
Special Mention 1
The Sentimental Tourists
The Sentimental Tourists EP
A collaboration between Dave Long and Paul Page, mixed and remastered by the great Jimmy Eadie. Long was the singer and guitarist with Into Paradise and Page was the guitarist with Whipping Boy. Jimmy Eadie played guitar in Into Paradise.
Two of my favourite Irish bands. Churchtown (1991) and Heartworm (1995) are two of my favourite albums. On Bandcamp the duo describe The Sentimental Tourists as: “low-fi, DIY adventures from the Underground class of 89.” That’s a perfect description of this EP, and it’s a lovely nod to the Underground pub on Dame Street where both Into Paradise and Whipping Boy played formative gigs in the late 80s. They followed this with the Living in Smoke Dreams EP and just in time for Christmas the festive-themed Lost Treasures EP.
The Sentimental Tourists have also announced a gig: the duo will play Cotter’s Bar on Cape Clear Island for Bobstock 2026 (03 and 04 July 2026).
Whipping Boy (justly) receive loads of love, and this year marked 30 years since the release of the band’s much-loved second album Heartworm, but Into Paradise are just as deserving of love too. They’ve been one of my favourite Irish bands for decades. If you’ve never explored their discography I can enthusiastically recommend Album 25, an Into Paradise primer, compiled by the band’s guitarist Jimmy Eadie, that was released in January 2025.
Special Mention 2
Various Artists
Hunger is Violence
(Diet of Worms)
Released digitally last December, the cassette came in January. The Diet of Worms cassette label gave us a compilation of various avant garde Irish artists’ interpretations of ‘Louie Louie’, the late 50s American standard made famous by The Kingsmen in 1963.
Kevin Barry in his liner notes gives us the history of Richard Berry’s song and all proceeds went to the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), a non-profit organisation working to raise awareness of the human rights abuses faced by the Palestinian people and to campaign for their rights and freedoms. Highlights for me include singular takes by pôt-pot, Natalia Beylis and Seamus Hyland.
A second compilation, The Sky Was A Mouth Again, this time featuring international artists (including Richard Dawson, This Heat’s Charles Hayward and Wild Billy Childish) covering ‘Louie Louie’ was released in July. Proceeds go to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Special Mention 3
Various Artists
Ambient Harvest
(Department of Energy)
A soundtrack to the greatest Celtic Folk-Horror that has yet to be filmed. Ambient Harvest is another, “landscape mixtape from the Department of Energy. 25+ artists gather gorse fires, sun gods, crop circles, bog bodies and summer lightning.”
The compilation, “delves into the dust and sweat of Ireland’s high summer. More than twenty artists deconstruct morning dew, waterfalls, falling leaves, Fir Bolg, Ogham scripts, hay-making, scythes, sickles, honey, dancing, life-cycles, mischief, the rain, the sun and coastal cattle.”
There is much to love here, but highlights include the tracks by Lore (DOE’s D Callanan and R Cherie) in which selected passages (‘Puck Fair’, ‘Local Burnings’, ‘Sun Altar’ and more) from Dúchas’s School’s Collection, a collection of folklore compiled by schoolchildren in Ireland in the 1930s, are read out and soundtracked by a bed of field recordings and ambient noise. Beautiful!
The 48 page full-colour A5 booklet that accompanied the digital release was one of my favourite purchases this year. A beautiful zine of, “Editorial, Speculative Fiction, Folklore, Track Descriptions, Photographs, Illustrations, Reading List, Artist Directory”. The DOE’s attention to detail is (as always) close to perfection. They’ve been doing this kind of thing for a few years now, curating out-on-the-edge digital Irish music and accompanying it with beautifully designed cultural ephemera: zines, posters, stickers and maps. All profits from Ambient Harvest were directed towards MASI (Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland).
Best Irish Albums of 2025
10. Michael Lightborne
Dormant Volcanoes of Ireland
(Gleo Records)
Described by Lightborne as “six long tracks, alternating drones and rhythms”. Dormont Volcanes of Ireland is the follow-up to 2022’s Slí na Fírinne. ‘Underworld/Limerick Volcanic Basin’ feature Mama Matrix on vocals (aka Irish experimental sound artist Clíona Ní Laoi. ‘Bog Bodies/Brí Éile’ features saxophone by Lorenzo Prati.
The cassette comes accompanied by a beautiful 24 page tri-fold risograph printed fanzine of illustrations, essays, images and further context. ‘Magma/Lambeg Island’ is one of the standout tracks on the album, named for the island of volcanic origin off the coast of Dublin, its pulsating electronic drones, repetitive clicks and bleeps underscored by the sound of crashing waves are completely hypnotic.
9. Adrian Crowley
Measure of Joy
(Valley of Eyes Records)
Measure of Joy is album No. 10 from Crowley (not counting albums he has recorded with James Yorkston, Matthew Nolan and Marry Waterson). John Parrish returns as producer but it’s a new label. Ten albums in, another great Crowley album. But the more I listened to this one, the more it revealed itself to be a GREAT Crowley album.
Nadine Khouri’s beautiful backing vocals alongside clarinet, mellotron and strings lend a mysterious edge to these songs. ‘Swimming in the Quarry’, the lap-steel infused ‘Genevieve of the Mountain’ and ‘Brother Was a Runaway’ are three of the stand-out moments.
8. The Murder Capital
Blindness
(Human Season Records)
The third album from the post-punk band. I was a big fan of When I Have Fears, their 2019 debut, but they kind of lost me with Gigi’s Recovery its 2023 follow-up. I wanted this to be great. Released in February, initially I wasn’t sure about Blindness, but over the course of the last ten months it’s revealed itself to be a seriously good record.
Blindness was recorded in LA and again the band worked with John Congleton. The producer is probably best known for his work with St. Vincent but he also produced two of my favourite albums this century: Shearwater’s The Golden Archipelago and Explosions In The Sky’s The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. There’s a simple difference between Blindness and its predecessor: the songs are much better. Maybe I need to go back and spend more time with Gigi’s Recovery?
7. Matthew Devereux
Keep Sketch
(House Devil Records)
The last few years have been creatively prolific for The Pale’s frontman. Devereux followed up 2024’s House Devil with Keep Sketch. The album, recorded using electronic instruments of the period, reminisces about growing up on the Northside of Dublin in the late 70s and early 80s.
The idea of using period instrumentation came early in the process for Devereux. “I wanted to treat it like you were making a movie and that your backgrounds needed to look like it’s from the 70s,” he told me. “So I treated the music as being the set design, the text to be Hiberno-English.” From its sepia-toned cover photograph of a young Devereux on the day of his first Holy Communion through to its evocative song titles (‘Keep Sketch’, ‘Northside Baths’) the album reeks of the 70s, but importantly, it’s not a nostalgic record.
Highlights include ‘Fancier’ (Devereux: “When I was growing up in the 80s every street had a fancier. There was a fancier who lived at the back of us. There were lofts everywhere. I found them to be part of the landscape.”) and ‘Government Milk’ (Devereux: “Talking about school days is an interesting thing, but I was looking for an emblem. For me, it’s that quarter pint of milk. It’s wrapped up on the line, ‘11 years old and threatening to kill, fighting on the belly full of government milk’. I think for a lot of folks, government milk is caught in a place and time.”
For Further Listening…
Matthew Derereux joined me on Episode 56 of To Here Know When - Great Irish Albums Revisited. We discuss the early days of The Pale, signing to A&M Records, recording their debut album in 1992, the album’s three singles (‘Dogs With No Tails’, ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Shut Up Venus’), becoming a self-sufficient band post major label deals, absurdity in music, creating a character on stage, the band’s unique sound, fusing Irish and Eastern music, and a whole lot more. We also talked about Keep Sketch. It can be heard below and episode notes are here.
6. The Would Be’s
HindZeitgeist
(Roundy Records)
Twelve years since Beautiful Mess, their debut album, and 34 years since a trio of near-perfect singles, The Would Be’s returned with their strongest record yet.
“It’s whatever is after the zeitgeist,” explained Julie McDonnell The Would Be’s’ singer when I asked about the album title. “Whatever has been in the zeitgeist, in the thoughts of the many, where does that go to? What happens after that? What’s behind us? What comes after? What’s the aftermath?”
The Would Be’s delivered again. They disappeared for a few years and then out of nowhere returned with a new bunch of indie-pop classics. The band always make it look so effortlessly easy but scratch beneath the surface and some of the most perfectly crafted pop songs are revealed. A brilliant return.
For Further Listening…
Julie McDonnell, Aidine O’Reilly and Paul Finnegan of The Would Be’s joined me on Episode 53 of To Here Know When - Great Irish Albums Revisited. We discussed the early years of the band: forming in Kingscourt, Co. Cavan in the late 80s; being championed by John Peel; supporting Morrissey; being lauded in the UK music press and their first three singles on Decoy Records including debut single ‘I'm Hardly Ever Wrong’. We also chatted about HindZeitgeist. It can be heard below and episode notes are here.
5. Sprints
All That is Over
(City Slang)
Letter to Self, their debut album made No. 5 on my “Top 10 Irish Albums of 2024” list and lo-and-behold here they are again at No. 5. All That is Over was a brilliantly confident follow-up. ‘Descartes’ and ‘Beg’ were two of the greatest songs of 2025.
4. Maria Somerville
Luster
(4AD Records)
Somerville’s had a great year. Luster, her second album (her first for 4AD), was released in April to rave reviews and she finished off the year supporting MBV in 3Arena. Many artists would have been thrown by an opening slot with such a legendary band but Somerville’s set was confident and assured.
If Ivo Watts-Russell was still involved in 4AD, the label he started back in 1980, I reckon he wouldn’t have signed half the artists that are currently on the roster (the final episode of States of Independence: the Beggars Banquet podcast suggests just as much). However, I think Watts-Russell would have totally believed that Somerville belonged on the legendary label. That’s the biggest compliment I can give Luster.
3. Kean Kavanagh
The County Star
(Heaven Sent)
The County Star is Portlaoise singer-songwriter/producer Kavanagh’s debut album proper after 2023’s Wrestling Music EP and 2020’s mixtape Dog Person.
Laois via Texas. Country music and Americana. Indie pop and soul. Beats and uilleann pipes. Townies and the GAA. ‘45s’, ‘Time Goes By’, ‘A Cowboy Song’ and ‘Father Brown’s’ are just four of the stand-out songs from this great album.
2. Junk Drawer
Days of Heaven
(Pizza Pizza Records)
With album No. 2 Junk Drawer set out to “attempt to make a work of weird, cosmic Ulster music”.
Aspiration: achieved!
I loved Ready For the House, Junk Drawer’s noisy debut album from 2020, but Days of Heaven feels like a HUGE leap forward. Highlights include: ‘The Prisoner’, ‘Jamie’, ‘Brown Sunshine’ and the album’s centrepiece ‘Loughgall Circus’, which Junk Drawer’s Stevie Lennox described to me as: “a fairly woozy, off-kilter organ-led psych number about the surrealism & inherited trauma of growing up in post-conflict Northern Ireland - a little like downtempo Fall, Fat White Family & Captain Beefheart.” It’s a fantastic album and one of the records that I played most in 2025.
1. Poor Creature
All Smiles Tonight
(River Lea Records)
Poor Creature are Ruth Clinton (Landless), and brothers Cormac Mac Diarmada (Lankum) and John Dermody (Lankum, The Jimmy Cake).
Lúireach by Landless was No. 4 in my “Top Irish Albums of 2024” list and False Lankum by Lankum topped my list in 2023. Fans of both of those records will find much to savour here.
All Smiles Tonight offers interpretations of old tunes from the early 1800s (‘Adieu Lovely Eirin’, a reworking of ‘The Forger’s Farewell’ a story of banishment to Australia from Belfast in the early 1800s, ‘Hick’s Farewell’, on which the trio are joined by Pumpkinhead’s Rick Epping on vocals, concertina and harmonica, and others) and a few contemporary songs (‘The Whole Town Knows’ (a song previously recorded by Ray Lynam and Philomena Begley, ‘Lorene’ a Louvin Brothers song) - permeated in trad instrumentation, drone-folk, and percussive ambient electronic elements. Strange, hypnotic, other-worldly. Album of the year.
For Further Listening…
John Dermody alongside his brother Diarmuid MacDiarmada and Dara Higgins joined me on Episode 36 of To Here Know When - Great Irish Albums Revisited, to discuss The Jimmy Cake’s second album, Dublin Gone, Everybody Dead. Sharing the Episode on X Lankum wrote: “To better understand how Cormac’s uncanny musical brain works, it helps to know that his older brothers were in this band…”
It can be heard below and episode notes are here.
For further reading…
by Paul McDermott
The Goo - Issue 42 (December 2025)