Kristen Sinclair

folking.com Dani Larkin’s debut record Notes for a Maiden Warrior is an album in two halves. The first, based around the theme of the Warrior, represents the dark side of the moon. It explores the archetype of Ulster as the warrior province, home to Cú Chulainn and his superhuman abilities. Larkin reinterprets this image in her songs, presenting the warrior’s strength through reflection and resilience. The second half, Maiden, is sleepy and sincere. It plays with ideas of light and feminine energy, showing strength through vulnerability and a celebration of love and kindness. Notes for a Maiden Warrior draws on ancient, otherworldly tales as a study of tenderness, pain and learning. Larkin’s native Armagh-Monaghan borderlands inform the sense of duality of the record, with one foot planted in each. Similarly, the ancient Irish concepts of the underworld and the supernatural underpin the LP, with the lines between the tangible and the mystical blurring with uncanny ease.   The...

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...