Lankum

The first minute of Lankum’s fourth album might lull you into thinking it’s simply a beautiful work of trad folk. Don’t be fooled. The Dublin four-piece open False Lankum with the singer and instrumentalist Radie Peat’s crystal-clear voice beaming out a cappella on the single Go Dig My Grave, but they quickly stagger into expansive territory. Yes, in one sense, they perform what you could call folk. But this is more a stunning collection of Irish trad – and a few originals – reimagined over the roar of droning, emotive…

How does it feel to have made the Guardian writers’ favourite album of 2023?It’s bonkers. The benchmarks we set for ourselves when we started 10 years ago – we’ve gone so far beyond them that it’s hard to comprehend. We’d go: “Let’s imagine we could be successful enough to have a sound engineer. Let’s aim for one day being able to do a tour of the whole UK.”Why do you think False Lankum has been a breakthrough album? I think we finally nailed what we wanted to be. We nearly got it on the last album , but that was a bit…

Outside, brightly dressed people head to festive functions. Inside the often dimly lit north London venue, the focus is more on death and suffering.To be clear, no audience members are physically harmed tonight by Lankum’s mantric take on traditional Irish music – although the Dublin foursome’s often confrontational acoustics are part of their considerable appeal. It’s the songs that tell of murders (multiple) and suicides (at least two), of grief and dread. There are mutinies at sea (the traditional The New York Trader).…

Radie Peat is a singer and multi-instrumentalist best known for her work with the Irish folk band Lankum. She grew up in Dublin and performed in pubs at a young age, singing and playing concertina (she also plays tin whistle, accordion, harmonium, banjo and harp, among other instruments). With Lankum, Peat has recorded four albums including this year’s False Lankum, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She’s also part of a new four-piece, ØXN, whose album CYRM – “a debut full of unsettling dark magic”, according to…

Lankum’s fourth album goes to new extremes, and not simply by dredging more trenches of their trademark gothic intensity. Four years after 2019’s raw-skinned The Livelong Day, with its exploratory epics, False Lankum teems with similar moments of iridescent bliss. But the 12 tracks here also unfurl into each other without a break, alternately lulling the listener then casting them into storms of shuddering sounds.Recorded in Dublin’s Hellfire Studio by day, while the band spent their nights sleeping in a Martello tower on…