PHOTO CREDIT – MOLLY KEANE
FROM HER SECOND ALBUM, ‘COME AS YOU ARE’, OUT 31ST MAY 2024 ON FACTION RECORDS – PRE-ORDER HERE
+ new limited-edition merch on sale now
PRAISE FOR NIAHM REGAN
“…Ready to pull us into a world of acutely observed vulnerabilities and introspection, the upcoming album is set to showcase a bold evolution of Regan’s sound” – EARMILK
“Niamh Regan is the real deal btw. A songwriter. a WRITER of SONGS. new stuff is somehow sounding even better. raising the bar and doing it FLAWLESSLY” – CMAT
“There’s a touch of Laura Marling in her voice, something of John Martyn in her intonation and Nick Drake in her guitar picking, the influence of everyone from Jeff Tweedy to Josh Ritter in her crafted storytelling – and yes, Lankum in her use of drones on songs such as “Madonna” and “Mortgage.” – 8/10 UNCUT MAGAZINE
Niamh shares the third single from the album today (18th April 2024), “Nice”, and of the song, she says “Nice is song inspired by the idea the only person getting in your way is yourself (most of the time anyway). I really enjoyed how this song came to life in the studio with Tommy McLaughlin in Attica Studios. The bass line gave it so much life and it’s now one of my favourite songs to perform live now.” Listen here: https://factionrecords.lnk.to/Nice
Coinciding with the new single, Niamh launches a range of limited edition “I’m Too Nice” merchandise, available to purchase online now: https://irishmusicmarket.com/collections/niamh-regan
Niamh Regan’s 2020 debut album ‘Hemet‘ introduced her as an artist with a gift for crafting folk-tinged songs with a quiet, reflective intensity. The release started to make waves and achieved over 1 million streams on Spotify and led to nominations for both the RTÉ Folk Awards and the Choice Music Prize ‘Album of the Year’.
Since its release, Niamh has embarked on headline tours from Ireland, to UK, Australia, Spain + more. Pairing this with many festivals and a variety of support opportunities with artist such as CMAT, Villagers, John Grant, SOAK, Patrick Watson, Sam Amidon, Cormac Begley, and Sorcha Richardson.
In between her performances, Niamh began to write her second record in Attica Studios with producer Tommy McLaughlin. She says ‘I arrived in Donegal to meet Tommy for the first time with a bunch of demos, half-baked ideas and feeling not ready, it was scary. But I’m so glad that I did it that way. Trusted the process and came into the studio with the intention of capturing exactly where I was with it all and Tommy helped me build from there.’
And here we are, with the upcoming release of that second album, titled ‘Come As You Are‘. It’s an album full of acutely observed vulnerabilities and introspection. Its themes are the issues that many of us find loom large in the small hours: questions of self-doubt, uncertainty about your life’s direction, whether relationships are flourishing in the way you’d hoped and determining priorities.
“A lot of it is about being in your late twenties and kind of realising we’re all running out of time,” she ponders. “I’d have bouts of massive self-belief in the studio, and then in the next breath I would be like, ‘This is the worst piece of music I could have even imagined.’ It was a rollercoaster. But through that I found self-acceptance; this is where I’m at and making peace with that. That’s what the album essentially is, just making peace with where I’m at and being realistic with myself.”
Niamh’s goal for the record was to achieve a richer, full live band sound, inspired by her love of Julia Jacklin, Caroline Rose, and especially Wilco. While there are moments of intimacy, the songs on ‘Come As You Are’ are far grander in scale and ambition than those on ‘Hemet’.
She has a contagious passion for performing live, having recently completed tours of Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and supporting CMAT in the EU. Niamh explains the joy of releasing new music for her is performing it to a live audience, “It’s the best feeling and I think I’ll be chasing it for the rest of my life.”
And that’s a feeling that ‘Come As You Are’ will help her tap into. It’s an album which is a confident step forward, full of songs with the spark to come alive on stage and with the immediacy to beckon newcomers into her world.
IE TOUR DATES (FULL BAND) 2024
November 14th – Cyprus Avenue, Cork (presented by In Bloom Agency)
November 15th – Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin (presented by Foggy Notions)
Tickets: https://shor.by/zC6c
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