When Joshua Burnside was about six he planned to run away from home, escaping through his ground floor bedroom window. Finding out about this plan, his older sister warned that if he jumped out the window, he’d go straight through the ground and into the depths of Hell to meet the Devil himself. That, of course, never happened. But still, the formative memory gives Into the Depths of Hell its title. A follow-up to 2017’s NI Music Prize-winning Ephrata , the album draws on its predecessor’s mélange of Americana, Irish folk and Cumbia rhythms, but with a decidedly darker edge. Never one to shy away from life’s big questions, his lyrical content tackles head-on the issues of self-medication, anxiety and humankind’s destruction of our planet. An apocalyptic chorus of voices and sound effects opens the album and is littered throughout. This cacophony of distortion, thuds and clattering adds to the general feeling of malaise. Vocals oscillate between whispered and bellowed, giving way
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