Tell people you’re going to meet Lyra and the reaction is warm, universally so. People know of her for all sorts of different reasons. “She was brilliant on that television show with Leo Varadkar. Really impressive,” says one person, referring to Lyra’s guest appearance on Uncharted with special forces veteran Ray Goggins, where she and Varadkar battled through the mountains of Drakenberg in South Africa. “Will you get a video of her?” wonders another, complimenting her fashion sense. “She’s doing the NFL performance, isn’t she?” says another, referring to Lyra’s rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann ahead of the NFL Dublin game at Croke Park in late September.
Lyra might have come to prominence for her music – her debut album went to No 1 in Ireland in 2024, pipping Beyoncé to the top spot and giving her the “Bandon Beyoncé” tag, but the Cork-born singer is what television producers call “relatable” in a way that stretches far beyond the world of the arts. Sweary, funny and candid, Lyra can’t help telling “juicy” or “cringe” stories from her life, any more than she can take the melody of Cork out of her earthy, robust accent. Perched today sipping tea in a private room of a five-star Dublin hotel, she grins at some superstar Elton John-style vibes she conjured up recently, when she and a few school pals went out for dinner in Bandon. Because the others were carrying cash, Lyra paid the bill on her credit card. “The girls were all breaking their holes laughing,” she says. “It’ll be all around Bandon, ‘Lyra is spoiling her friends for dinner!’ Everyone thinks I’m minted. I was like, ‘Give me that cash money’.”
She specialises in bursting bubbles even when she has been the one crafting them. Sure, she’s the siren you’ve seen stretched across a billboard, looking J Lo-level sexy to promote her eponymous album. She’s the artist with the bottomless lungs, belting out hits such as New Day and Falling, which made it on to Grey’s Anatomy and Love Island, in a sonorous, operatic style with hints of London Grammar by way of Lady Gaga. But don’t believe the music videos or the Instagram reels: “It’s smoke and mirrors,” she says. What about the photos of Lyra wearing white shades on a private jet that surfaced recently on her social media accounts? Yes, she confirms, it’s true she arrived by private plane to Ireland for the NFL game, but what you didn’t see was that it was a lucky lift from a friend. “I won’t say who in case they’d be mortified, but they said, ‘Would you like to come?’ and I was like: obviously!” she says, in an accent so singsong it needs its own backing track.
Today, as if to illustrate the point, she is wearing a mix of Dunnes Stores and H&M on her petite 5ft 3in frame: black, baggy, on-trend jeans, counterbalanced by pointy black shoes, a tight white top and thin gold jewellery.
“I love Dunnes,” she says. When she introduces her song Queen live, she always says that the bridge, where she chants that she’s “dressed in Gucci and Bottega”, is nonsense. “I say openly: ‘By the way, that middle eight is fake news: I do not wear Gucci, Miu Miu, Fendi or Prada.”
We’re meeting today because Lyra has a new tour to promote – it kicks off in mid-October in the Gleneagle in Kerry – but today is also the day before she performs Amhrán na bhFiann at Croke Park. Tomorrow she has 90 seconds in which to capture and enrapture the crowd. For any artist, the challenge would be immense: to stand before an audience of 80,000, cameras and stadium lights trained on you, and sing for all you are worth. It’s a moment that will make you reflect on your career, on perceived inadequacies, and all the things that have been said to you in the past. Lyra is fretting about her skin – she has forgotten some skincare at home – and naturally she’s worried about the performance itself.
“When people tell you you’re not good-looking enough, not skinny enough, your voice is too loud, do you ever lose things like that?” she says. “I was told at one point, ‘You sound like you should be singing in a football stadium’. Well, hang on, I am tomorrow actually.”
Growing up in Bandon, the daughter of a biochemist and a restaurateur, Laura McNamara was 11 when she first learned to brace herself before the sharp knives and cutting tongues of the industry. “I went to go to a really well-known vocal coach. My parents were like, ‘I think you have something, you gotta go to this guy’. I went to him for the first introduction, where he susses you out. He wouldn’t take me. So I’ve never been trained.”
Why didn’t he? “He didn’t think I was good enough.” Her throat catches on the last two words. She laughs to disguise her emotion. “Am I cringing myself out? Maybe I was a bit too raw or rough and not ready.”
Ireland has a culture of singer-songwriters, but not of female pop stars. There wasn’t an obvious path for someone like Lyra, aside from the Louis Walsh school of manufactured pop (she tried that route too, auditioning for RTÉ talent show You’re a Star as a teen). When she moved as a young hopeful in her 20s to London, sharing a flat in Hackney with her sister Sarah, she had great ambitions and crippling doubts. She got it into her head that she could be a pop star if she could just get thinner. Thinness mattered: the magazines on news-stands at the time sported covers where Britney Spears’ cellulite was pointed out; circles drawn around areas of flesh to shame stars publicly. The messaging was impossible to ignore.
“It’s the feeling of not feeling good enough,” she says. “But if you’re skinny, if you look like a pop star, you will be good enough.” Early advisers piled on pressure. “I thought, They must know best. They’ve made pop stars before. Maybe I am a bit on the broken side.”
Feelings of self-disgust took hold. “I did have bulimia, and I didn’t realise I had it because I was so deluded that it was a way to get to what I thought I had to be, what I was told I had to be,” she says. “Looking back, I’m like, Oh my God, how did you put yourself through it? But you do because you think it’s the right way.”
In the throes of her eating disorder, her periods stopped. “I was skin and bone. It was disgusting and my teeth felt weird because of the acid. It’s acid all the time. It’s not good for your vocal cords. I was like, what the f**k are you doing? You’re trying to be in this music industry. You’re going to have no voice. I don’t smoke. I cut out all drink when I’m going on a tour. I’m very strict on myself. And there I was, throwing up in a toilet.”
It’s an odd thing, to talk to someone who is so witty and charismatic and capable – who can so easily make people laugh – and then still see the deep insecurities. Lyra can throw out one-liners with the ease of a professional comedian. But she carries with her a harsh and striking tendency to do herself down. Half of it seems to be due to the usual Irish trope of not having any airs or graces about yourself, and the other half seems to be a genuine struggle within for self-worth.
“I might look in the mirror and be like, Oh my God, what is that? Your hair is rank or your skin is awful. I’m really bad at being able to be like: you’re fine, it’s just a bad day.”
Does she have tools for dealing with those feelings? “Honestly, I don’t think I do,” she says, after a pause.
One of the important things that happened for Lyra in the late 2010s was a gradual understanding that the path people were sending her down was not the best for her. She parted ways with her management; she asked for a meeting with Caroline Downey, who represents Hozier (and is now her manager too), and signed with respected record label Rubyworks. She began doubting the doubters. Initially with earlier advisers, her demos had been policed for her heavy Cork accent: “I’m pretty certain that on certain sections of the demos it wasn’t me singing,” she says. She had been instructed not to talk between songs on stage. “Like, ‘Don’t talk. Be mysterious’. That’s so bloody boring. I’d leave.”
She decided to talk and be more open, on Instagram and in her stage shows. “It’s taken a while for me to be comfortable,” she says. “I was like, people want to see me in the amazing outfits and in the photo shoots; they want to see the polished side of me. I convinced myself of that until I started doing shows and talking to people. A girl came up to me and said, ‘Oh, I thought you would be up your own ass, but you’re gas craic, just like us’. So I started introducing myself a bit more. I didn’t want to dilute how hard working I am, but I also wanted them to see I’m not just the girl in the photo shoots or, you know, prim and proper.”
Reality suits Lyra. It makes sense that Uncharted, which saw her in a hoodie, soaked to the skin, trekking uphill with a pony and an ex-taoiseach, was a hit for RTÉ. Not many women would choose to trudge up a mountain in South Africa in the rain – and glue on acrylic nails for the task. “They were like, ‘Are you taking those nails off?’ I was like, No. You have to have the nails. I couldn’t have anything else.”
She also forgot Varadkar wasn’t a close personal friend. “I’m an awful bum smacker. I gave him a little bum smack and I was like, ‘That’s the former taoiseach of Ireland’. I went back and I said, ‘Leo, I’m a very affectionate person. If I’m in your personal space or anything, please let me know.’”
She cites CMAT as an example of a pop star she admires, and Charli XCX. Both artists are known for being honest and straightforward – showing off glamour but also the side to them that is vulnerable and messy and unvarnished. Lyra enjoys looking sexy – she loves sparkles and sequinned microphones and customised glam – but she can’t keep that up all the time. “I dress up. I do have the laugh. And I put on this brave face. But I’m also very vulnerable and human.”
She acknowledges that the eating disorder isn’t something that can simply vanish. “I don’t know if it’s a thing you fully get over,” she says. And you can hear it in the corners of her conversation, when she mentions cellulite on her thighs “front and back”. Her “jiggly bingo wings”. When she talks about “starving herself” into an outfit. It’s like hearing the dialogue in her head out loud. Sometimes it’s jokey, sometimes not. “Some days I have to pull myself up and be like, ‘You’re not going back there. Stop.’” The way she characterises it, it’s a fight.
I bring up a subject that has surfaced recently online: the chatter about the many people who are microdosing Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs. As she ping-pongs between her base in Brighton and her mother’s home in Rochestown in Cork, Lyra sees it in her own circles.
“What is going on? It’s mad. It’s a fashion fad in London at the moment. We don’t even know the long-term effects. These people don’t need this medication. It’s bonkers. I have friends that are doing it. One of my friends said, ‘Are you on the [jabs]?’ I was like, no I’m not. I’m stressed off my head and I’m trying to write my second album.”
She laughs. She’s been agonising about the new record. Her summer single Weird Club delivered staccato vocals over skinny electro-pop synths, claiming different sonic territory from hits such as Falling. Lyra isn’t sure if it’s the direction she wants to go in. “You have to be brutally honest with yourself.” She won’t be playing many new songs on the upcoming tour, because she firmly believes in giving her audience the hits they have paid to come and see. “People want to hear what they know,” she says. “I don’t want to be too self-indulgent.”
For the tour, she’ll give the audience her all. “I’m not holding back just to make money,” she says. “I got the bill for the lights the other day. Are you shitting me? It’s a year’s rent. A lot of money. It better be special. I will always invest in my live show for the people who show up for me.”
The same is true of her NFL performance, a high bar she clears effortlessly the following day. She worked with a designer Phoenix V to make a bespoke outfit. She went to an Irish-language coach to improve her pronunciation. She did the hard yards.
Lyra’s lifestyle isn’t for everyone. You wonder if it will always be right for her. She is sacrificing a lot to succeed. There are days when she cries from sheer loneliness; the sense of “what am I doing with my life?” She loves being around her sister’s children. Her thirtysomething school pals are doing the things people do – hens, weddings, christenings – and she has missed many of their big moments. “They’ve stayed friends with me,” she says. “I’m lucky.”
I’m not saying I want the Brady Bunch, but I would like somebody to hand down my costumes to
Her boyfriend is a former professional rugby player who stays out of the spotlight but offers a lot of support. “I go away for weeks on end and he’s like, ‘We’re hopefully going to have the rest of our lives together. We have time’. Well, your nails are done. She laughs. “Taylor, could we borrow the ring there, hon? Drop the knee!
“It’s a hard industry, especially as a female. We grow humans because we have the superpower,” she says. “I don’t know what life holds for me in that sense. I’m hoping I’ll be able to do both. I know people say, ‘Why can’t you?’ But doing this at 110 per cent, it’s full-on.
“I’m hoping that maybe I’ll have worked so hard that it will pay off and I will be able to have the best of both worlds. I will be able to have my music career and that family that I want at one point in my life. I’m not saying I want the Brady Bunch, but I would like somebody to hand down my costumes to.”
As we’re leaving, in a deft move that many of us who have been faced with an all-inclusive hotel buffet will recognise, she scoops the white sugared croissants that have been left out in a basket on the table for us into a napkin, so she can enjoy them upstairs in her room later. “They know you’re doing it, they don’t mind,” she says cheerfully – and you remember that her mother ran a restaurant for 23 years, with Lyra and her sister helping out in the family business. As ever it’s very relatable. Very Lyra.
Lyra’s Members Only tour starts on October 18th. ticketmaster.ie.
Main photographs: Mikey Aldridge; Make-up: Sue Brophy; Hair: Stephen James Hennessy; Dress: Phoenix V
If you are affected by the issues in this article, the Bodywhys helpline is 01-2107906.
