I always knew I wanted to do music. Growing up in Fermanagh, I was lucky to have older siblings who said, ‘Don’t do the thing your careers teacher tells you to do, just do the thing you love.’ I had a good ear. I could pick up instruments and pick up tunes. If I was going through anything, I’d have to sit down and bash at the piano. There’s an inner confidence there. I liked what came out; what I made. I believed in myself and believed I could make this a career.
I’m 25. I have three older siblings and we all grew up with traditional Irish music. My grandfather played the bagpipes and was an amazing singer. He died a month ago and he told me as he was dying that The Clancy Brothers asked him to go on tour with them and he turned it down because he was raising a family.
My father used to play the accordion and would have pushed us to learn Irish music. We would all have competed in Fleadh competitions. My mother brought us all over the country – her job was bringing us to lessons and competitions.
My older brothers were very influential because they started to get into alternative music and electronic music and they introduced me to Daft Punk when I was six or seven. At 15 I became obsessed with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. It was all I could listen to. At 18 I studied composition in the Royal Irish Academy of Music and moved to The Hague at 20 for the third and fourth years of that undergrad.
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Moving away from Ireland shook me. I think going away from home for a little bit is essential. Everything started happening. My teachers said, ‘You have this very rich culture and you’re very connected to it. You should explore it, because that’s who you are, and to be a musician you have to know who you are.’ They brought me back to trad in a way, incorporating traditional melodies with my contemporary, modernist influences in music.
Keening for me is a catharsis; it helps me. It’s a guttural, visceral, intuitive way to voice your emotions
I have a love-hate relationship with trad. I love trad and I sing in a traditional way, but my live performances are inspired by my own modern contemporary understanding of music. Dad’s a traditional beef farmer. I’ll put my dad’s cattle calls into a techno track: ‘Suck, suck, suck, suck.’
When I started to get into keening, I’d never had a loved one to grieve over. But every human goes through trauma. I think keening is a release of negative thought patterns, of bad life experiences. Meditation helps people. Getting a hug replenishes people. Keening for me is a catharsis; it helps me. It’s a guttural, visceral, intuitive way to voice your emotions. In pre-Christian times, keening would have been a very natural part of the wake. It was the practice for a woman to sit beside a coffin and keen.
I really like to scream in the car whenever I’m going through anything, and make weird vocal noises. No one can hear me. The car is probably the only place where you can do that – even in your house if you did it, the person next door would probably ring the police. Then it became the right thing to do musically, to express myself.
I was very close to my grandfather. After he died, I just screamed. I lost my voice after three days, going around in the car, having to do a few big journeys. By the time the funeral was over, I felt at peace with it.
Keening communally is something I haven’t done, but understanding something that’s bigger than yourself like grief needs to be done communally. I’m sure that’s what keening used to be. Everything is so individuated now. You have to have a brave face and cry by yourself. I think going back to this more pagan and less Christian and sterile way of dealing with the world would be so helpful for people.
Róis is my stage name. I don’t want to be a tyrant about it, but I prefer to remain anonymous. I have lots of different reasons for it. I don’t like to be recognised. I’m very introverted. I never thought I would be a [front person] performer, I thought I would be in the background in a band. That’s always what I wanted to do. But it never happened and I thought, ‘Ah, just do it yourself.’ I like to do a gig and however many people are there, it’s easy to finish the gig, take the mask off, and then no one knows who you are.
In conversation with Nadine O’Regan. This interview is part of a series talking to well-known people about their lives and relationship with Ireland, and was edited for clarity and length. Róis plays the National Concert Hall with Crash Ensemble on Tuesday June 17th as part of the MusicTown 2025 concert series. Tickets €22 from nch.ie
