The freewheeling spirit that has come to define folk music in recent years is writ large across the nominees for the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards 2025. It’s palpable in the wide-angled soundscape of Lankum, in the glorious voice of Ríoghnach Connolly and in Cathy Jordan’s left-field explorations of the crankie box.
It’s there too, in abundance, in the emerging artists who have been nominated, steeped in a scene as vibrant as it has ever been and hungry to maintain its relevance in an ever-crowded musical landscape.
Eliza Carthy, scion of the English folk legends Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, expressed her frustration at the way music by, of and for folk is treated in her home country. “Are the English unique in their stubborn ability to reject their folk music?” she asked, spurred by her father’s experience of playing live for what she says are “relative pennies”.
In Ireland we’ve long had a comfortable relationship with our folk and traditional music, which is threaded like a tapestry through our social and political lives. Lisa O’Neill and Damien Dempsey belong to a long line of artists, from the anonymous balladeers of the 19th century to Christy Moore and Karan Casey, who have painted the world as they see it, in all its richness and rawness.
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Lemoncello, a duo whose music embraces but is not exclusively folk, have been nominated for the best folk album award for their eponymous collection and for best original folk track for Old Friend. You can hear echoes of Nick Drake in Claire Kinsella’s spare cello lines and Laura Quirke’s guitar, tracing an ever-widening gyre around songs of identity and confusion that are of their time, but infused with an eclectic range of influences from pop and jazz.
“Folk is such a tradition that we really respect,” Kinsella says. “We aren’t trying to be just that, but we really do respect the genre, especially the storytelling aspect of it. We do include a folk song on the album, My Lagan Love, and the way we recorded the album has elements of folk storytelling in it, so it’s an honour to have that recognised.”
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Quirke has form with the Folk Awards, having already been nominated for In the Half Light, an EP that she released in 2021 with Joshua Burnside (who is also nominated this year). She values the recognition that a nomination brings, as well as the camaraderie that defines her experience of folk music.
“It feels like that’s what the folk awards are all about,” she says. “It’s not a competition. It’s more a celebration of community.”
It’s not just sounds that have influenced Lemoncello, but visuals too: there’s a David Lynch quality to the video for their single Dopamine, which is a timely reflection on social media’s power to hijack our attention.
“It’s probably one of the most serious things we have to deal with now, the fact that our attention is being taken away from us,” Quirke says. “We don’t really have anything else: our time and how we use it, and where we place our attention, is the most important thing, and it’s being stolen. It’s really scary. If your time and attention are taken by an advertisement for, say, a weight-loss product, you’re not really focusing on the things that we’re meant to be focusing on or that might make a positive change in the world. Or things that allow us to live our lives contented or peacefully.”
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Róis, a Co Fermanagh artist whose work embraces traditional sean-nós, folk and electronica, with elements of jazz, is another nominee – as best emerging artist and for best original folk track – who defies ready categorisation.
Improvisation and jazz harmonies are evident in her work, in which she melds electronica with a deep love for the ancient art of keening. With two albums, Mo Léan and Uisce agus Bean, under her belt, she has already refined her musical identity to a point that many artists struggle to achieve so early in their careers.
“I’ve always felt a need to explore and a need for adventure,” Róis – aka Rose Connolly – says from Lisbon, where she spent January escaping the darkest days of the Irish winter. “Wanting to find something new and innovative is what I’ve always wanted in music. I grew up with trad and then started listening to jazz improvisation. Then when I went on to study music. Improvisation was always a key component of composition for me.”
There are shades of Ani DiFranco in Róis’s sampling, her sharp lyrical style and her political insights, and echoes of Gerry Diver’s Speech Project in the delicacy of her sampling of sean-nós.
“I was really interested in keening women and in political minded music,” she says. “I think art is inherently political, but I’ve been drawn towards the lost traditions in Irish culture. Sampling the keening women was something I was very interested in, as well as making my own keening. It fitted into the whole album idea of creating a big, cathartic sound. What I’ve really been interested in with this album is the big ‘scaoil amach’” – or release – “in the context of death”.
Alongside the boldness of her most recent collection, Mo Léan, catharsis is at the heart of the suite of songs on her 2023 album, Uisce agus Bean, with Róis digging deep and daring to go to a primal place that’s as much about tracing a path back through generations as it is about delving into her own subconscious.
“I’m interested in the feminism that’s inherently in sean-nós and having a conversation about that. Uisce agus Bean was 12 songs that weave in stories about the goddesses of Ireland and how the feminine was embodied in the land, and how we’ve forgotten that knowledge.
“It’s also just me looking towards a higher sense of being that’s got lost in our psyche,” she says. “They were a connection to the land, and to biodiversity as well. The goddess Gráinne was a goddess in Kerry, and her body was embodied in the land; Lough Gur, in Limerick, is spoken of as her womb. Books I’ve read like Manchán Magan’s Thirty-two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape really inspired me too.”
The sense of this being a particularly notable time in folk music is one that Róis feels deeply.
“There is definitely a postcolonial zeitgeist going on,” she says. “We have so many people in the mainstream, like Kneecap, talking about who we are. There was so much shame about British colonisation and the Catholic Church, but I think we’re starting to take agency over that and decolonise the mind, and take back what was ours, of our own volition.
“Because there’s been 30 years of no violence and we’ve had time to think about it, I think we’re starting to think a lot more about our identity in the South. In the North we’ve constantly had to think about it, but there’s a lot of self-reflection going on at the minute. To know who and where you are is very important as an artist, and to know where you came from is very much part of that.”
RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards 2025: The nominees
Best original folk track
- Caoine by Róis
- Chasing the Hare by Alannah Thornburgh
- I’m for Gallipoli by Fiach Moriarty, featuring Damien Dempsey
- Old Friend by Lemoncello
- The Good Life by Joshua Burnside
Best traditional folk track
- Bean an Fhir Ruaidh by Diane Cannon
- Helen of Kirkconnel Lea by The Half Room
- Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye by Macdara Yeates
- The Rocky Road to Dublin by Lankum
- Welcome Home Gráinne by Natalie Ní Chasaide and Iarfhlaith Ó Domhnaill
Best folk singer
- Cathy Jordan
- Christy Moore
- Macdara Yeates
- Ríoghnach Connolly
Best folk instrumentalist
- Alannah Thornburgh
- Diarmuid Ó Meachair
- Macdara Ó Faoláin
- Sinéad McKenna
Best folk group
- Altan
- Cuas
- Keane Connolly McGorman
- Landless
Best folk album
- Crankie Island Song Project by Cathy Jordan
- A Terrible Beauty by Christy Moore
- Fíoruisce:The Legend of the Lough by John Spillane
- Keane Connolly McGorman by Keane Connolly McGorman
- Lemoncello by Lemoncello
Best emerging artist
- Cuas
- Niamh Bury
- Róis
- Seamas Hyland
- Sinéad McKenna
The RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards will be held at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Wednesday, February 26th; they will be broadcast live on RTÉ Radio 1, with a highlights programme on RTÉ television
