Junior Brother

Coughlan's, Douglas St.

Thu 17th Dec, 7:30 pm

Carefully pushing the boundaries of what modern Irish folk can look and sound like, Junior Brother is an idiosyncratic, challenging, and richly lyrical singer/songwriter from Co. Kerry.

His much-anticipated third album, The End was released this Autumn and is a defining release for the artist. The album is on Strap Originals, a label forged with love by Peter Doherty of The Libertines.

The End is a deeply instinctive yet carefully considered response to the chaos of modern life, with Junior Brother weaving the recent years of upheaval into the eerie folklore of Fairy Forts.

‘The sound of the album is supposed to take the organic instruments of Irish traditional music and lift them somewhere else,” Junior Brother explains, “like the otherworldly Irish music sometimes heard from Fairy Forts at twilight on country roads, impossible to recreate upon hearing.”

In these uncanny tales of displacement and confusion, he found striking parallels to the instability and distortion of contemporary life. Thematically, The End explores forces that work against nature (New Road, Welcome to My Mountain), the rise of the far-right (Small Violence, Today My Uncle Told Me), and confrontations with mortality (Old Bell, Start Digging).

Through the lens of rural Irish folklore, the album reflects the bewildering madness of the present moment.





“A giddy marvel” - 4 Stars -MOJO


“A skilled recontextualist with a rich, expressive style”UNCUT

“Traditional Irish instrumentation is pushed into strange and eerie new climes”

THE QUIETUS