Bell X1

Chop Chop (2013)

“Shrink the palette!” was the battle cry from Bell X1, whose 2011 album Bloodless Coup had shoehorned them into a corner from which escape was unlikely without radical action. That creative rethink was Chop Chop, across which the band straddle piano-driven mini-anthems (Careful What You Wish For), gorgeous pop songs (Diorama) and completely un-Bell X1-like songs (Starlings Over Brighton Pier, A Thousand Little Downers). The only Bell X1 album to be co-produced by Peter Katis and Thomas Bartlett, Chop Chop is proof that placing new heads on old shoulders sometimes has to be done to do the job right. Which is what exactly Bell X1 did here.

Delorentos

Night Becomes Light (2014)

In 2012, Delorentos won the Choice Music Prize with Little Sparks, an album full of the niftiest of pop/rock gems, but even that record was no match for Night Becomes Light. Always expressive, here Delorentos added eloquence to their creative lexicon. Where Little Sparks was one cracking song after another, this was an emotionally inspired concept album with a coherent storyline that, without fuss, conveyed the significance of home. The songs (including Home Again, Dublin Love Song, Everybody Else Gets Wet) broadened the band’s creative reach without ever losing sight of the goal: absolutely perfect pop music.

Villagers

Darling Arithmetic (2015)

Conor O’Brien is one of Ireland’s most consistently inventive songwriters. Any one of his post-2010 albums could be here, but Darling Arithmetic has been earmarked because it sidesteps uncertainty. A solo album in all but name, the songs are stripped of anything that might bear a resemblance to rock music’s intricacies, while the unambiguous lyrics are the epitome of heartfelt. It isn’t just the sparseness, however, that takes you by the hand to walk down Lonely Street — it is also O’Brien’s creative purity across songs such as Courage, Dawning on Me and the title track that delivers silent but effective sucker punches.

Little Green Cars

Ephemera (2016)

About two years ago, Little Green Cars featuring Faye O’Rourke morphed into Soda Blonde; they left behind two superb albums — 2013’s Absolute Zero and its follow-up. It beggars belief that the band didn’t gain more commercial traction but it would be a crying shame to forget the work they released, especially Ephemera. Based around, essentially, death (people, relationships) and associated traumas, balance is achieved by a dozen songs (highlights include Easier Day and The Factory) that are so ingrained with classic harmonious pop tropes you almost forget how difficult it is to make it sound so effortless.

Fionn Regan

The Meetings of the Waters (2017)

Folk music’s so-called new Pied Piper had other ideas on his mind when he released The Meetings of the Waters. The album was Fionn Regan’s way of dealing with a genuine predicament: considering giving up music for visual art. The album is a conscious turning point, the songs showcasing an outsider’s view of what it means to be a questioning artist in a generally indifferent world. The music style is mostly acoustic, reflective and tender, with the 12-minute closing instrumental track perhaps a sign of what’s next. Or maybe not. With Regan, you never know, and therein lies the risk and the appeal.

Kojaque

Deli Daydreams (2018)

For some, Deli Daydreams is either an extended EP, a mini-album or an album proper. Its brief running time of 27 minutes, however, packs in a lot, and if its hip-hop concept about working behind an inner-city deli counter sounds humdrum, then more fool you. Kojaque (Kevin Smith) comes at his subject from diverse perspectives. These include smartly applied found sounds (dialogue snippets, PA announcements, radio news) that add authentic sensibility to the storylines. The result? An extended masterpiece, a mini-masterpiece or a masterpiece proper. Your call.

Mango x Mathman

Casual Work (2019)

A work of genuine integrity is rarely delivered with such tenderness and pugnacity. Casual Work — the debut album by Dublin hip-hop duo Mango x Mathman, aka Karl Mangan and Adam Fogarty — arrived two years this month full of righteous anger and concern. As with many other motivated music acts, 2020 should have been theirs, but Casual Work was cruelly snatched from the jaws of victory. We are left with articulate, emotive songs about masculinity, Dublin, self-confidence, endurance and the certified knowledge that if the words don’t grab your attention then the beats — from mellow to manic — definitely will.

Pillow Queens

In Waiting (2020)

The debut album by all-queer indie band Pillow Queens couldn’t arrive quickly enough, and if you were specifically searching for a piece of work that told you something about your life — your very real life of growing up different, fearful but also brave, if not borderline invulnerable — then In Waiting had it. The songs are effortless indie pop/punk, scratchy guitar songs full of breezy melody lines that emphasise growth pains from teenage years to adulthood, as well as a lot of self-awareness that arrives during those turbulent years.

Denise Chaila

Go Bravely (2020)

Many are called but few are chosen, and with Limerick’s Denise Chaila it seems obvious that when it comes to articulately speaking out about such topics as culture, heritage, racism, misogyny, domestic violence and gender, there are very few who can do it like her. It helps that she has charisma to spare and a considered confrontational tone, and it helps that she has the verbal acuity to put across such thoughts. There’s something else going on here, however, that makes Go Bravely (a mixtape and not necessarily viewed by Chaila as an album proper, despite it winning the Choice Music Prize for Best Album 2020) so perfectly titled.

J Smith

(…) And You Chose Not to Laugh (2021)

Despite their brilliance, some records are always going to be shoved aside. In the hope that it will be brought back in from the cold, J Smith’s debut — released without fanfare in May — is here. A record borne out of true heartbreak (his wife’s miscarriage), the superbly arranged and played music shifts from the soft and ballad-like (Sunday) to the potent (The Car). Assisted throughout by his brother Daniel and Donagh Seaver O’Leary and Dylan Lynch (both of Soda Blonde), there are layers here that continue to unfold, textures that continue to surprise and impress.