Editor’s Note: Today is St. Patrick’s Day across the land, but we don’t need a holiday to get our green on. The music coming out of Ireland lately has been nothing short of essential in recent years, with bands like Fontaines D.C. and The Murder Capital ushering in a new era of vitality that rivals, if not beats outright, anything happening over in Great Britain. Our digital pages are filled with new and tested Irish bands cranking out must-hear tunes, and below are seven — a lucky seven — of our recent faves dating back to last year. We like to describe The V List as a roundup of all the things on repeat here at Vanyaland HQ, and this fresh list is no exception.
Fontaines D.C., ‘It’s Amazing To Be Young’
No list of essential modern Irish bands is complete without perhaps the best current rock band on the circuit in 2025 — in Ireland or anywhere else. But can a band or artist deliver a SOTY contender right after dropping the AOTY? Chappell Roan did it in 2023 into 2024 with The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess into “Good Luck, Babe,” so it makes perfect sense that bridging last year’s vibe with the fresh sound of now is Fontaines D.C., the Dublin City standouts who in February followed up the era-defining, no-skips ROMANCE album with an elegantly dramatic new James Ford-produced single called “It’s Amazing To Be Young.”
“It’s Amazing To Be Young is a song that was written in the presence of a newborn child — Carlos’ child,” says bassist Conor Deegan III, citing guitarist Carlos O’Connell. “It sounded more like a lullaby or a music box then, but with the same lyric — ‘it’s amazing to be young’. The feeling of hope a child can give is profound and moving, especially for young men like us. That sense of wanting to create a world for them to grow up in happily. It’s a feeling that fights against the cynicism that can often overtake us in the modern world. So we wanted to declare which side we were on — it really is amazing to be young. We are still free, and want to make that feeling spread. We want to protect it for the others around us, and maybe in doing that, can also help protect it for ourselves.”
“It’s Amazing To Be Young” arrives with an official video from BAFTA-winning filmmaker Luna Carmoon (Hoard, Shagbands), who provided the creative vision for the Irish band’s videos for “Here’s The Thing” and “In The Modern World.” And now there’s a bit of a cinematic universe developing, as the visual completes a trilogy by bringing together the actors from the prior videos (Ewan Mitchell’s Martin from “In The Modern World” and Grace Collender’s Spider from “Here’s The Thing”) for what’s dubbed “an unlikely but beautifully surreal love story.” Feel it below.
Adore, ‘Can We Talk’
Adore would like a word. So it’s best we just listen. The rising Irish trio continue a striking new blast of energy with “Can We Talk,” a buzzing dose of melodic garage punk that hit the streams in November with a reckless fervor. Produced by Gilla Band bassist Daniel Fox, “Can We Talk” is described as a cross-examination of cyclical patterns of abuse, and follows punchy September call-to-action anthem “Supermum!,” which brazenly took us back to the halcyon hype era of Cool Britannia’s ’90s heyday.
“‘Can We Talk’ revolves around a pattern of abuse where one is picked up when broken, broken down even farther and is moulded into something subservient, meek and willing to please,” says vocalist Lara Minchin. “There is an awareness that one doesn’t get into these situations from a good start. In my experience there has been something unhealed in me that has made me lean into control in the past. It begins with not being allowed to disagree with small things, until dangerous patterns of behaviour come to the front and you are so beaten down and made to feel so worthless that you feel like there is no conceivable way you can leave.”
The Murder Capital, ‘The Fall’
“I can’t be told, I can’t be dressed, I can’t be held, I can’t be fed, I can’t be whipped.” That’s James McGovern breathlessly and brazenly in The Murder Capital’s powderkeg tune “The Fall,” the Irish post-punk luminaries’ first new music of 2025 and one of a handful of standouts from last month’s infected third album Blindness. It joins the neon grayscale glow of “Can’t Pretend To Know” and the gritty, muck-fueled dirge of “Words Lost Meaning” in the band’s eerie ability to harness a growingly expansive cacophony and drag it across a figurative floor of broken glass.
There’s a raw catharsis in these new tracks, particularly in “The Fall,” and what follows is a full-on exhale of societal tension as The Murder Capital continue to soundtrack our lives on the brink. “‘The Fall’ is coming,” McGovern warns. For many of us, “The Fall” has arrived.
Scustin, ‘Charmer’
As we cite whenever we can, Dublin has been exploding with killer new bands in recent years, especially when it comes to a particular strain of post-punk cited above. But post-funk seems to be a wide open territory, and Scustin have staked a significant claim with a heavy dose of fun and swagger via disco-mad dance tune called “Charmer.” The electric track, recorded and produced by Richie Kennedy (Interpol, Shame, The Murder Capital) at Black Mountain Studios, hit the streams in November, and has allowed us to dance to keep from crying ever since.
“The new single is an analysis of the deluded — a love song rooted in fiction, a love letter to the Celtic Tiger — Ireland’s boom era,” Scustin declare. “‘Charmer’ narrates the tale of a pub regular who attempts to hide their insecurities and bolster their ego by fabricating a fable about a romantic encounter with a pop star in the ‘90s on a flight home from New York to Dublin. Set during the dawn of the Celtic Tiger, our anti-hero reminisces about a time defined by decadence and excess as he tries to remember an echo of love in the dregs of his pint glass.”
We’ve all heard varying versions of that tale once or twice in our lives. Take it with you to the pub this afternoon.
SPRINTS, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’
SPRINTS, the fiery Irish punk quartet who unleashed debut album Letter To Self back in early ’24 via City Slang, appear to be an IYKYK kind of band. And those who know have been rewarded with an engaged listening experience. With a sound that blends the grime of fellow Dubliners The Murder Capital with the grit of Savages and more familiar shadow-spun classics like Siouxsie and Bauhaus, SPRINTS package a piss n’ vinegar fireball of a record that’s equal parts abrasive and inviting.
It’s a remarkable and cohesive effort — with Letter To Self, and our personal fave “Shadow of a Doubt,” SPRINTS have captured the tension and unease felt by many, channeled through a cleansing cacophony of aggressive euphoria. Sure, it’s more than a year old, but it still sounds like the future.
“[Letter To Self] is a deeply personally and autobiographical album lyrically and in its key themes, while sonically it explores a space inspired by our love of early-’80s gothic, ’90s noise-rock and more modern influences,” says singer, guitarist and lead song-writer Karla Chubb. “It revisits our most vulnerable moments and imbues them with visceral garage-punk. It aims to take the things that are considered inherently negative — feelings of anxiety, anger and rage, and turning them into a positive. Using our experiences to fuel us and pouring them into a positive outlet. It’s cathartic, it’s honest, it’s raw.”
Cardinals, ‘Twist & Turn’
The music of Cardinals has an eerie nature to it. The Cork band creates the type of haunting indie rock that looms overhead like a ghost, releasing from the speakers the songs that sound like they’re playing for friends engaging in the type of life activities they’d both be talking about 15 years later.
We might be talking about Cardinals long down the line as well, and their debut self-titled EP, which dropped last summer via So Young Records (hopefully named for the greatest of Suede songs), sets a supernatural tone for the moments that shape it.
The genre-spanning, layered, and rich record is led by the eager and yearning “Twist and Turn,” a track so frightening in its familiar and comforting nature that its dense tenderness belies its lyrical nature. “[This] is a song about how writing has become a highly therapeutic practice for us all,” the band admits. “It’s got some poppy melodies and a danceable backbeat, but the lyrics though, they’re all about grief.” How perfect for the right here, right now.
Skinner, ‘Tell My Ma’
Back in September, it had been a minute since a new track has made us want to run through a fucking wall. Then along came Skinner, the Irish no wave provocateur who unleashed powderkeg single “Tell My Ma” to set a breakneck tone for his disco-noise EP Geek Love, which followed in October.
“Tell My Ma” is 86 seconds of primal, fidgety explosiveness, finding Dublin-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer Aaron Corcoran taking a tattered page from the New York scene of the late-’70s and early-’80s and filtering it through the Irish experience. It slashes and thrashes with raw fury and doesn’t give itself any chance of overstaying its welcome, instead escaping down a mental alleyway before a collected breath can be taken.
“I wrote this as a spin off to the old Irish folk song for children ‘I’ll Tell My Ma’. I remember my mam used to sing it to me when I was a child and it’s always stuck with me as a kind of comfort song,” Skinner says. “I think as you get older it’s funny how things you think are innocent as a child take on a more sinister meaning when you read into them as an adult. Lyrically I think the original folk song hasn’t particularly aged too well in terms of relevance to gender equality or what is now deemed as acceptable in society so I wanted to take the lyrics and recycle them by screaming and shouting them in anger and protest instead of the jovial way the song is usually sung.”