Dublin musician Pádraig Cooney shares his dreamy bedroom pop single ‘Houses (feat. Bronwyn Murphy-White)’ today, Thursday 1 September 2022, via Strange Brew Records and announces his forthcoming debut album Centuries of Learning, out Thursday 29 September 2022.
Cooney is now releasing music under his own name after writing and performing in Dublin-based bands for over a decade, from Land Lovers through Skelocrats to Autre Monde. He was a founder member of the Popical Island Collective, which ran a label, venue, and other initiatives through the 2010s.
‘Houses’ is a property ballad characterised by lush 70s synths and stilted latin percussion straight out of a box, with a vocal melody to go all the way to court for. His wife, Bronwyn Murphy-White, takes the lead on vocals, her sweet, haunting voice like something out of a David Lynch movie. The track’s lyrics—“Houses, what of the prospect of doing without? Why bother with them when you can turn out / Eight hundred bedroom hotels?”—will certainly hit home for anyone who’s been crushed by Ireland’s ongoing housing crisis.
Cooney says of the track: “I have been in a few bands now and made several records. I consciously approached this album as a moral redux of the first record I ever recorded myself, the 2008 Land Lovers debut Romance Romance, in that it’s all me, putting everything into making the best thing I can make with the limited talents and means at my disposal at home. I have an ace to play in that context, and it was the beautiful singing of my wife Bronwyn who kindly stepped in to raise this number up higher than the mountain. Side-note: the single is released on our daughter Juno’s first birthday!
“‘Houses’ is a song about the perversity of the house as an object of desire and speculative asset. The outro has a load of ‘lololos’ rather than ‘lalalas’, which is the Spanish way and is pleasing and amusing to my ear.”
Cooney previously released two singles from Centuries of Learning, ‘Space’ and ‘Engrenages,’ which can be found wherever you listen to music.
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