Author: Zoé Piater

Welcome to Honey Muzzle, Dublin’s newest rock concoction. Led by the electrifying guitar skills of Cormac Breslin and the soulful, stirring vocals of Josh Dunford, the band’s power and energy has breathed new life into the age-old blues rock genre.

Honey Muzzle’s debut single ‘Higher’ – released in July 2023 – became an instant hit, captivating the airwaves and winning the hearts of music enthusiasts. Breslin’s gritty guitar riffs blended seamlessly with Dunford’s evocative vocals, making ‘Higher’ a perfect example of the band’s signature sound. 

‘Stained’, the band’s second single, was released in October 2023. The song’s soulful essence struck a chord with audiences, garnering airplay on renowned stations like 2FM, Radio Nova, Dublin City FM, and KCLR. 

Honey Muzzle’s latest offering ‘Screams’, to be released March 29th,  is a brutal and snarling portrayal of a relationship torn apart by lack of communication and honesty. As they venture beyond the Dublin music scene, Honey Muzzle aspires to share their passion and creativity with audiences worldwide.

Some artists just make you sit up and take notice!
Hailing from North Co Dublin .. Audrey Marian Fay with her distinctive voice, delivery and songwriting is one such performer!

Having released her debut Single – ALIVE, followed by THE WITCHING HOUR, she has now released her third single RUN.

Alternative Singer Songwriter and guitarist.. Audrey has been making big waves amidst the music scene in London and Dublin. With power house vocals, unique stand out songs and that edgy raw sound ..she is set to be moving very fast this year! Her music, songs, sound and live performance.. have all the energy and vibe that you would expect from Audrey. Think Cool, Dark, Indie Dance, Tarantino Vibes !

SINGLE OF THE WEEK
With Martin Bridgeman KCLR
“Punchy as hell , grabs you straight away , Great Intro”

‘..From the moment RUN begins its impossible to not feel the vibrant energy and those catchy
melodies.. it’s one of those songs you want to put on repeat.. it gives me the feels ..’
Maria McCormak / OTW Radio

“It was her songs that attracted me first, but the strength of emotion she can deliver when
singing these songs. Makes her the complete artist!”
Tony Platt ( Legendary UK Record Producer- Bob Marley -AC/DC – ThinLizzy)
All of her work is recorded and produced in Skerries Co Dublin by her partner in music, producer and guitarist Enda Duffy.

Find her music on all digital/ streaming platforms:
@AudreyMarianFay Instagram/ Facebook

Minding Creative Minds’ (MCM) March online Meet and Greet Session takes place next Monday, March 25th at 7pm.  Registration is now open for this free monthly event. 

To register please click here:  https://mindingcreativeminds.ie/events/meet-greet-march-25th/

We look forward to welcoming our creative community peers, friends and colleagues to Minding Creative Minds first online meet and greet session of 2024 on next Monday, March 25th, and you can register for this free event by clicking here

Those attending Minding Creative Minds monthly meet and greet set the agenda.  It is with absolute intent, we have this meet up as an informal gathering monthly.  Each Minding Creative Minds monthly meeting follows its own path while offering a space to source core information about Minding Creative Minds and our services; a space where we can learn about and from our peers whose creative backgrounds may differ to our own; but we all working in the creative sector brings us together.  Our meeting is a welcoming social community whose common bond is our sector; the creative sector. 

Remember, when registering if you wish us to address a particular area during the meeting and if we have capacity we will aim to engage with this, or If you have a question and your preference is for a private response; just let us know this also.  It is important to remember we do not claim to have the answer to every enquiry we receive; in this instance, we will make every effort to find someone who can help. In addition, some enquiries or questions can require a body of work to offer proper practical support; for example, our career mentoring programme is in answer to a number of career and skills related enquiries.  If you are curious for an update to an enquiry via this meeting registration process, please feel free to just ask for an update via our  info@nullmindingcreativeminds.ie email.

*The contact details for all Minding Creative Minds services remain as they have been since our launch in June 2020. 

• 24/7 Dedicated Phone Line: ROI 1800 814 244 | NI / UK: 0800 0903677 | International: 00353 15180277
• General enquiries are also welcome to: info@nullmindingcreativeminds.ie

Minding Creative Minds (MCM) is 100% Free & Confidential and our services include; 

• Counselling service (12 support sessions)
• Specialist trauma and abuse counselling
• Legal assistance
• Financial assistance
• Specialist career focused Mentoring Programme
• Career focused Workshops and Masterclasses and more…for the Irish Creative Sector

*Currently scheduled Minding Creative Minds career hub workshops, masterclasses and events

In addition, a list and registration details for career hub workshops, masterclasses and other events scheduled for the near future can be located here

Our monthly meet up sessions are presented by Minding Creative Minds’ (MCM) in association with The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, EPIC Working Group, Irish Music Rights Organization (IMRO), Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), MCD Productions & The Cowshed.

Photo credit: Molly Keane

“…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

“Niamh Regan continues to show us why she’s one of the best up-and-coming songwriters in folk music worldwide…” – The New Age Mag

Last month, critically acclaimed Irish artist Niamh Regan announced her sophomore album ‘Come As You Are’, due out May 2024 via Faction Records, along with a gentle and stirring first single Madonna.

Ahead of her upcoming UK tour in April, she shares the follow up single ‘Belly’, with an accompanying lyric video created by Julie Bryant. Ruminating on the song, Niamh says “Belly is a light-hearted song with full band production, dealing with an idea of feeling like a broken record and not being heard.” Official Lyric Video: https://youtu.be/xH_c8H3HTHU

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 around Ireland, UK, Australia, and 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, Sorcha Richardson, Josh Ritter, and many more.

In between her performances, she 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 a solo tour of Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, 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.

Niamh embarks in a co-headline headline tour across the UK with Christof van der Ven in April, and has announced full band shows in Ireland for November 2024, plus many more dates to be announced.

Pre-order Niamh Regan’s album ‘Come As You Are’, out May 2024 via Faction Records.

https://irishmusicmarket.com/collections/niamh-regan 

‘Belly’ by Niamh Regan, is out now (Thurs 21^st March 2024): https://bfan.link/NRBelly

UK TOUR DATES 2024
April 2^nd – Hug & Pint, Glasgow (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 3^rd – Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 4^th – Cardigan Arms, Leeds (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 5^th – The Engine Room, North Shields (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 7^th – The Folklore Rooms, Brighton (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 8^th – SJQ (Servant Jazz Quarters), London (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 9^th – Gulliver’s, Manchester (with Christof Van Der Ven)

IE TOUR DATES (FULL BAND) 2024
November 14^th – Cyprus Avenue, Cork
November 15^th – Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin

Tickets on sale now: https://shor.by/zC6c

A powerful piano driven ballad about the mixed messages we get about what we need to do to be worthy of love in our lives, a song about realizing that love comes from being true to ourselves. Eimear Crehan is a Kildare based artist with extensive recording and performing experience. Her 2023 single ‘I am Woman’ went to no1 in the itunes charts and she is very excited about her newest release due out on March 29th. Eimear is currently touring with Paul Brady and has her own national headline ‘Grá Mór’ tour coming up, starting in Belfast on April 12th.

Connect with Eimear Crehan: instagram facebook www.eimearcrehan.com

Irish rapper Kojaque was recently presented an IMRO Award in recognition of his album Phantom of the Afters.

The IMRO Number 1 Award was introduced to acknowledge IMRO members who reach number 1 in the album charts here in Ireland.

“I feel a lot of pain, I found a lot of peace.” – Kojaque

Nothing lasts. Childhood, creative cycles, intentions, relationships, plans, dispositions, moods, gaffs, direction. Even love. Even home. The mode is transition. In this space between, Kojaque’s latest album contends with the past, and embarks upon a new future. His first two records changed the Irish hiphop landscape forever. Now London-based, Kojaque’s Phantom of the Afters traces the blurred outlines of childhood trauma, depression, grief and love. This is an album that finds comfort and assurance in the acceptance of the self, through shedding what no longer serves. Informed by the pursuit of simplicity, while meditating on heartbreak, home and health, Phantom of the Afters finds Kojaque reflecting on the landmarks of a young life, in all their beauty and complexity.

With Phantom of the Afters, Kojaque balances the themes and tensions of love, ambition, and internal and external sites of creation. “Love is accepting things for what they are,” he says, “ambition is wanting more than what you have.”  This playful, triumphant album, wrestles with emigration, depression, and life as an expression of dreamlike fantasy interrupted by grinding, liberating, and grounding reality, the music opening up to allow for a space for vulnerability to be expressed in a radical manner. “What the record is about,” he says, “is shedding an idea I have of myself and trying to accept me for who I am, warts and all.” Taking visual inspiration from subverting the bigoted depictions of Irish caricatures in 19th and 20th century Punch Magazine cartoons, and Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, which in turn was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Phantom of the Opera, Kojaque removes the many distorted masks present within all of these touchstones, and ultimately, his own. Written and composed at time of personal tumult, upheaval, and literal eviction, the result is a heart-spilling and filling album to savour. This is the mark of an artist in tune with the things that really matter. As the title track asserts: “all I want to be is me”

The latter half of 2023 was busy for Irish midlands producer OWLS. With headline shows in Dublin, a slew of electrifying underground shows and the release of singles Swallow My Love & Bury Me, the darkwave specialist re-emerges in 2024 with a vicious synth-punk protest in his latest Body Bags.

The song and video have been largely informed by the unfolding events in Gaza. Body Bags looks at humanity turning in on itself.  For all the beauty & harmony in the world, we are chaotic by nature – violent and cruel to our own. It explores the human condition and our ability to inflict pain and suffering upon the most vulnerable. It’s forced the Longford artist to look outward instead of inward.

“All of my songwriting up until now has been dealing with internal conflicts and self assessment. It feels selfish looking inwards when being faced with genocide daily. I teach History. It seems to be repeating itself. I had a Palestinian student join one of my classes recently. They presented a project on the ancient buildings of Gaza City only to highlight the fact that they’re no longer there. That hit hard.”

OWLS pulls from elements of synthwave, industrial and darkwave to deliver a relentless two minutes of synthesizer punk, drawing inspiration from artists like Meryl Streek, N8NOFACE and Bob Vylan. The video for the track was shot on site in Co. Longford Ireland by Nathan Sheridan. It features the characters ‘Bird’ & ‘Gimp’. A macabre couple finding moments of co-operation & harmony in the complete chaos & violence of our world today.

TAKEN FROM THEIR FORTHCOMING EP ‘I DIDN’T BEFORE, BUT I SEE IT NOW’ ON RELEASE APRIL 12^TH 2024

TICKETS FOR IRISH AND UK TOUR ON SALE NOW HERE

Post-Party will release their new single ‘Negative Energy’ this Friday March 22^nd. The song is a groovy indie-pop track that talks about the moments where we let our negativity consume us, and how it’s important to approach any given situation with a brighter outlook to allow good moments to prosper.

It is the second single from what will be the bands sophomore EP, ‘I Didn’t Before, But I See It Now’ due for release April 12th. The band will celebrate the release with their debut UK and Ireland tour, returning home to The Button Factory on April 13th.

About Post-Party

Formed in 2018, Post-Party are an Indie Rock outfit from Ireland that started when band members Matthew & Keelan – who coincidentally share middle & last names – met in college after a roll call confusion ensued during class. Rooting their sound in the turn of the centuries new rock revival embellished with the sounds of 80s New Waves and Indie, Post-Party seek to recite tales of their youth and juvenescence with an eye towards the state of things to come. With regular airplay, 1 million Spotify streams and counting, heavyweight Spotify playlisting & DJ support both at home and abroad, the band have been cutting their teeth live supporting the likes of LoveJoy, Inhaler, Miles Kane, New Rules & Wild Youth.

With consistent self-produced output, they teamed up with renowned Irish hit producer Philip Magee during lockdown to work on a number of tracks which would form their debut EP, ‘We’re Not Getting Any Younger’, which reached a number three chart position. They moved on from their debut at pace, following with single “Lap Around The Sun”, a fast paced guitar track with a rhythmic chorus hook.

‘Negative Energy’ the brand new single from Post-Party is out this Friday March 22^nd, 2024 across all digital platforms.

For more information:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/postpartyband/?hl=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Post.Party.Music/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PostPartyBand

Castlebar’s own musical talent, Chris Cresham, is gearing up for an electrifying year in 2024, filled with new music releases. He already has started the year on the right foot selling out his headline gig in Garbo’s on Saturday, February 24.

Following his selection as one of the finalists for Hot-press Magazine’s ‘Irish Music Month’ competition last March, Chris has continued to solidify his place as a rising star in the industry. Drawing inspiration from his experiences abroad, including a stint in Cyprus where he honed his skills as a songwriter and performer, Chris has embraced opportunities to collaborate with renowned figures such as ex Voice of Ireland star Liam Geddes and rising band Kingfishr’s producer Patrick O’Donnell from Limerick.

These collaborations have further enriched his musical skills, leading to the creation of deeply resonant tracks that have amassed over 100 thousand streams in total on Spotify. He has also opened for prominent artists like Chasing Abbey, Late Late Toy show star Michael Moloney and Hudson Taylor.

His latest track ‘Back To You’ has also gained him national radio play from the likes of Today FM, iradio, SPIN 1038 and 98 FM. Chris recently has been selected for the Unsigned Sea Sessions Competition to be in with a chance of playing main stage at this years Sea Sessions Festival.

After releasing “Perfect In My Eyes ” and “Free Like The Ocean ”, Rea Garvey will now return with his newest pre-released album single  “Somewhere Close To Heaven ” in collaboration with the band “Picture This ” on March 15 ^th .

Rea Garvey  shares very personal insights of the single creation process and cooperating with Picture This :

“I’ve watched  Picture This from the wings since Day #1! After they joined me on tour in Germany, I was even more a fan than before and wanted to get us into studio and make music.
We wrote together trying to capture our Irish roots and our inborn love of music.
The song “ Somewhere Close To Heaven ” is a diary entry of every Irish person abroad.
We love to sing, dance and celebrate life and in doing so we are home again if only in our hearts and minds.
Picture This  and I needed to find a song whose sum was greater than the parts. “ Somewhere Close To Heaven ” couldn’t have been written by one of us, it’s a combination of both music worlds giving that supernova effect.
I have to love what I do, it’s the last freedom of a musician and we didn’t leave the studio until what
we wrote and recorded blew our minds. I want to say we walked out but in truth we crawled out, Joyous!Ryan Hennessy (the singer from Picture This) is one of the best text writers I’ve heard in a long time with a wealth of melody which often blinds me.   If writing this song was a race, I often found myself catching up but the last 100 meters felt like a photo finish :) This song is Irish, it’s good feeling, it’s how I feel, it’s how I want to feel.”

Rea Garvey´s highly anticipated album “Halo” will be released on September 13rd.

Picture This have established themselves as an acclaimed band out of Ireland; known for their compelling songwriting and electrifying performances. Their ability to blend heartfelt lyrics with powerful melodies has garnered them a devoted global fan base.

The band represents a global underdog story, Picture This have unassumingly captivated listeners in every corner of the world through 3 album releases on Republic/Universal US and up to new adventures on RCA Germany and UK.

The band have amassed 450 million total streams , sold out stadiums including a five-night stand at Dublin’s 3Arena (equivalent to London’s O2), headlining Electric Picnic’s Main Stage in front of 70’000 people (see video at bottom) and selling out their first European underplay tour in 20mins in Spring 2023,  playing all key European festivals in 2023 with the European tour in autumn 2023 seeing them play over 30 headline dates.