Album pre-order: https://orcd.co/jbtheend
Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7QHMFuameU
Channeling the ancient and eerie through a modern lens, Junior Brother crafts a brand of Irish folk that is idiosyncratic, challenging, and richly lyrical. Today, he shares Welcome to My Mountain, the bold opening track from his forthcoming third album The End, set for release on September 5th via Strap Originals – the label forged with love by Pete Doherty of The Libertines.
A sprawling, unpredictable track built on a hypnotic whistle riff and shifting time signatures, Welcome to My Mountain serves as a headlong dive into the darkly surreal world Junior Brother continues to conjure – where ancient myth rubs shoulders with modern unease.
In Junior Brother’s own words:
“The opening track on the record stemmed from my attempt at writing a slipjig – The song’s main whistle riff was the result. With this, the song mutated into quite a large beast of a yoke, the beginning of a journey into the mouth of modern madness. The lyrics were largely taken from an actual firsthand account of a man getting lost in a Fairy Fort while walking home, heard from UCD’s great folklore podcast Blúiríní Béaloidis.”
The official video, created by longtime collaborator Ellius Grace, brings to life the eerie story at the heart of the song. As Junior Brother describes it: “An older Local in rural Ireland relays the events of a strange encounter with another world to a Collector. The Collector brings to this tale his tape machine and his cynicism, but ends up immersed, and ultimately trapped, in the rural purgatory the Local Man describes. Teller and Collector become merged, within the pastoral world of the Old Man’s nightmare.”
Official Video by Ellius Grace
With The End shaping up to be his most ambitious and unflinching work to date, Junior Brother continues to prove himself as one of Ireland’s most distinctive and uncompromising voices.
Watch the official video for Welcome to My Mountain here .
The End arrives September 5th on Strap Originals.
Stream Welcome To My Mountain Now: https://orcd.co/jb_wtmm
The End is a deeply instinctive yet carefully considered response to the chaos of modern life, with Junior Brother weaving the recent years of upheaval into the eerie folklore of Fairy Forts. These ring-shaped earth mounds, scattered across the Irish countryside, are known to possess an energy that can bewilder, curse, or even lead the unwary astray. Stepping into one is to risk losing yourself—both physically and spiritually. To Junior Brother, this ancient folklore mirrors the disorienting reality of today’s world.
“The sound of the album is supposed to take the organic instruments of Irish traditional music and lift them somewhere else,” Junior Brother explains, “like the otherworldly Irish music sometimes heard from Fairy Forts at twilight on country roads, impossible to recreate upon hearing.” The End captures this essence, blending the raw textures of traditional Irish music with spectral, unearthly elements.
Much of the album’s inspiration was drawn from UCD’s Folklore Collection on duchas.ie, “I delved into the manuscripts—endless eyewitness accounts of Fairy Forts being stepped into and the land altering, the familiar mutating,” Junior Brother shares. “Farmers, teachers, the sober, the smart—all losing their way home one way or the other.” In these uncanny tales of displacement and confusion, he found striking parallels to the instability and distortion of contemporary life.
Thematically, The End explores forces that work against nature (New Road, Welcome to My Mountain), the rise of the far-right (Small Violence, Today My Uncle Told Me), and confrontations with mortality (Old Bell, Start Digging). Through the lens of rural Irish folklore, the album reflects the bewildering madness of the present moment.
“The title The End represents the moment after being led astray, when the grip of madness releases you and you suddenly see your way home,” says Junior Brother. “It may reflect the doom of a world gone mad, but it also represents the end of darkness, and the start of a new road.”
This collaboration with Strap Originals marks a new chapter in Junior Brother’s evolving career, with The End set to be a defining release.
Album pre-order: https://orcd.co/jbtheend
Sign up to Junior Brother’s mailing list: https://junior-brother.kit.com/6dbb50fac9
Official store link: https://juniorbrother.tmstor.es/
Junior Brother will take to stages across Ireland, the UK, and EU in the coming months, see him at:
June
6 GLASGOW Glad Cafe
7 STIRLING The Tolbooth
July
6 LIMAVADY Stendhal Festival NI
August
9 ANTRIM Under the Drum Festival NI
12 EDINBURGH La Belle Angelle supporting Peter O’Doherty
13 EDINBURGH La Belle Angelle supporting Peter O’Doherty</strong
29 DORSET End of the Road Festival with the Incredible String Band
September
12 CORK The Pav Sounds From a Safe Harbour Festival Album Launch
13 DUBLIN Grand Social Club Album Launch
14 DUBLIN Grand Social Club Album Launch
20 LONDON South Bank Centre QE Hall with the Incredible String Band
21 DROGHEDA Vantastival Festival
October
10 TRALEE LASTA Festival Síamsa Tire
November
9 CLONAKILTY DeBarras Samhain Festival
14 GALWAY Róisín Dubh
15 LIMERICK Upstairs at Dolan’s Warehouse
21 DERRY Sandinos
22 BANGOR Open House Festival
23 DUNDALK Spirit Store
26 BIRMINGHAM The Victoria
27 LONDON Hootananny
28 LEEDS Hyde Park Book Club
29 MANCHESTER Gulliver’s
Tickets available at: https://www.juniorbrother.com/tour
“Wry songs of anxiety and frustration” – The Guardian
“[an] incomparable, alchemy-inducing sound and uncompromising lyricism” – Hot Press
“One of the island’s all-time songwriting greats” – Brian Coney, The Thin