The 50 best albums of 2023, No 1 – Lankum: False Lankum | 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 arrangements and tight vocal harmonies. Broken into sections by three fugue interludes, the album defies genre while yanking classics into the 21st century.

Lankum have been building up to this sound for years. When they formed more than a decade ago as Lynched, named after the founding members, siblings Ian and Daragh Lynch, they hewed closer to trad’s roots. A 2015 Jools Holland performance of two songs from their album Cold Old Fire seems positively chipper compared with how they sound today (and False Lankum’s 2019 predecessor, The Livelong Day, was even heavier).

Where initially woodwind and jaunty harmonies prevailed, Lankum have since embraced a mixture of light and shade, pulling you from plucked strings to sudden cacophonies that could soundtrack the onset of a nightmare. The band started working more closely with the producer and unofficial fifth member John “Spud” Murphy on The Livelong Day; they have credited him with drawing out what they call the “sound in our heads” – unsettling, layered and mesmerising as it may be.

Almost exactly halfway through Netta Perseus (written by Daragh), the bottom drops out of a deceptively sweet pairing of vocals and acoustic guitar, chucking you into a thrum of percussive booms and keening thriller-film viola; imagine the tumult of a thunderstorm scored to music, rendered fiercely propulsive and satisfying. It’s hard to pinpoint all the instruments creating the dirge, even for the musicians who created it. The instrumental track Master Crowley’s is inspired by Donegal-born Hugh Gillespie’s 1937 fiddle performance of a medley known as Master Crowley’s Reel. By the time Lankum are done with their nearly six-minute version, they have sped up the tempo and transformed its traditional fiddle arrangement with concertinas and hard-to-pin-down percussion. Speaking to the Guardian this year, the band member Cormac Mac Diarmada pointed out a section of the song “where there’s a waspy type of sound? I have no idea what that is,” he said. “No idea.”

False Lankum isn’t all hair-blown-back intensity, though. Musically, Lord Abore and Mary Flynn – featuring Mac Diarmada’s vocal debut, alongside Peat – is tender and delicate. Of course, this being Lankum, it’s also the Irish version of a Scottish ballad about a mother who poisons her son because she can’t stand his girlfriend. The girlfriend dies by her young love’s bedside when she rushes to see him after he falls ill. Grim stuff, sure, but set to Mac Diarmada and Peat’s lilting voices, it’s a bittersweet respite from the album’s heavier moments.

Similarly, the stripped-back Clear Away in the Morning floats along while setting the album’s nautical feel. The band recorded False Lankum in a Martello tower on Ireland’s eastern coast, seeing the sea each morning. They didn’t set out to reference the water, but later realised it had cropped up several times, ebbing and flowing like the immense surge of the album itself.

False Lankum hacks out its own path, with few songs ending sounding as they started. That variety was intentional – and ends up being incredibly effective. As Peat put it to the Irish Times: “Things work best in contrast because it makes both parts stand out. If something is the same for two hours, your brain stops hearing it.” There is no chance of that happening here: the staggering beauty of False Lankum stays with you long after its run time concludes.

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 arrangements and tight vocal harmonies. Broken into sections by three fugue interludes, the album defies genre while yanking classics into the 21st century.

Lankum have been building up to this sound for years. When they formed more than a decade ago as Lynched, named after the founding members, siblings Ian and Daragh Lynch, they hewed closer to trad’s roots. A 2015 Jools Holland performance of two songs from their album Cold Old Fire seems positively chipper compared with how they sound today (and False Lankum’s 2019 predecessor, The Livelong Day, was even heavier).

Where initially woodwind and jaunty harmonies prevailed, Lankum have since embraced a mixture of light and shade, pulling you from plucked strings to sudden cacophonies that could soundtrack the onset of a nightmare. The band started working more closely with the producer and unofficial fifth member John “Spud” Murphy on The Livelong Day; they have credited him with drawing out what they call the “sound in our heads” – unsettling, layered and mesmerising as it may be.

Almost exactly halfway through Netta Perseus (written by Daragh), the bottom drops out of a deceptively sweet pairing of vocals and acoustic guitar, chucking you into a thrum of percussive booms and keening thriller-film viola; imagine the tumult of a thunderstorm scored to music, rendered fiercely propulsive and satisfying. It’s hard to pinpoint all the instruments creating the dirge, even for the musicians who created it. The instrumental track Master Crowley’s is inspired by Donegal-born Hugh Gillespie’s 1937 fiddle performance of a medley known as Master Crowley’s Reel. By the time Lankum are done with their nearly six-minute version, they have sped up the tempo and transformed its traditional fiddle arrangement with concertinas and hard-to-pin-down percussion. Speaking to the Guardian this year, the band member Cormac Mac Diarmada pointed out a section of the song “where there’s a waspy type of sound? I have no idea what that is,” he said. “No idea.”

False Lankum isn’t all hair-blown-back intensity, though. Musically, Lord Abore and Mary Flynn – featuring Mac Diarmada’s vocal debut, alongside Peat – is tender and delicate. Of course, this being Lankum, it’s also the Irish version of a Scottish ballad about a mother who poisons her son because she can’t stand his girlfriend. The girlfriend dies by her young love’s bedside when she rushes to see him after he falls ill. Grim stuff, sure, but set to Mac Diarmada and Peat’s lilting voices, it’s a bittersweet respite from the album’s heavier moments.

Similarly, the stripped-back Clear Away in the Morning floats along while setting the album’s nautical feel. The band recorded False Lankum in a Martello tower on Ireland’s eastern coast, seeing the sea each morning. They didn’t set out to reference the water, but later realised it had cropped up several times, ebbing and flowing like the immense surge of the album itself.

False Lankum hacks out its own path, with few songs ending sounding as they started. That variety was intentional – and ends up being incredibly effective. As Peat put it to the Irish Times: “Things work best in contrast because it makes both parts stand out. If something is the same for two hours, your brain stops hearing it.” There is no chance of that happening here: the staggering beauty of False Lankum stays with you long after its run time concludes.