You wouldn’t expect the first release on the newly revived Claddagh Records label to be a startling collection of experimental doom folk, but sometimes nothing sounds better than an assumption getting crushed. Øxn are a bewitching quartet featuring the Lankum frontwoman Radie Peat, Katie Kim, and Spud Murphy and Eleanor Myler of Percolator, who radically rework folk into new shapes and sounds.
This daring six-track debut (whose name is pronounced sy-rum), which grew out of a collaboration between Peat and Katie Kim for Nollaig na mBan, was recorded in a Martello tower in Dalkey and at Hellfire Studio in the Dublin mountains, both locations where Lankum forged their majestic Mercury Prize-nominated album False Lankum.
One day, that tower might become as famous for Irish music as Sandycove’s Joyce Tower is for Irish literature. The elements even get a role in the proceedings, as on The Feast you can hear a howling gale at the Hellfire.
The first track, Cruel Mother, features the unmistakeable voice of Radie Peat singing in a sean-nós style before transforming into a darkly mysterious folk song with shades of The Rip, Portishead’s classic gothic folktronica single. It revisits an appalling time for women, when having a child outside marriage was criminalised and mental-health issues were dismissed as demonic.
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The Trees They Do Grow High also looks at a dark tale from a female perspective. It’s about when a 24-year-old woman is forced to marry a 14-year-old, who becomes a father at 15 and is dead in his grave a year later.
The parting glass is a cover of the late Scott Walker’s Farmer in the City. Walker does not receive a fraction of the posthumous recognition he so richly deserves; this should have listeners scurrying back to the original. It’s a jaw-dropping version, elongated to just under 13 minutes, and faithfully observing the great unwritten rule of covers: make the song your own. Scott’s operatic warble is eschewed for a pulsing, slowed-down vocal, before unleashing a feast of drone and noise.
Cyrm is an even more sonically adventurous record than False Lankum, which is the album of 2023 so far hands down. They might not have entirely invented a genre, but they’ve refined and perfected an idiosyncratic take on 21st-century neofolk that sounds like nothing else on earth.
Øxn have unexpectedly gifted us the most astonishing surprise package of the year.
