Last month, critically acclaimed Irish artist Niamh Regan announced her sophomore album ‘Come As You Are’, due out May 2024, along with a gentle and stirring first single Madonna. Ahead of her upcoming UK tour next month, she shares the follow up single ‘Belly’, with an accompanying lyric video created by Julie Bryant. Ruminating on the song, Niamh says “Belly is a light-hearted song with full band production dealing with an idea of feeling like a broken record and not being heard.” Niamh Regan’s 2020 debut album ‘Hemet’ introduced her as an artist with a gift for crafting Folk-tinged songs with a quiet, reflective intensity. The release started to make waves and achieved over 1 million streams on Spotify
In between her performances, she began to write her second record in Attica Studios with producer Tommy McLaughlin. She says ‘I arrived in Donegal to meet Tommy for the first time with a bunch of demos, half-baked ideas and feeling not ready, it was scary. But I’m so glad that I did it that way. Trusted the process and came into the studio with the intention of capturing exactly where I was with it all and Tommy helped me build from there.’
And here we are, with the upcoming release of that second album, titled ‘Come As You Are’. It’s an album full of acutely observed vulnerabilities and introspection. Its themes are the issues that many of us find loom large in the small hours: questions of self-doubt, uncertainty about your life’s direction, whether relationships are flourishing in the way you’d hoped and determining priorities.
A lot of it is about being in your late twenties and kind of realising we’re all running out of time,” she ponders. “I’d have bouts of massive self-belief in the studio, and then in the next breath I would be like, ‘This is the worst piece of music I could have even imagined.’ It was a rollercoaster. But through that I found self-acceptance; this is where I’m at and making peace with that. That’s what the album essentially is, just making peace with where I’m at and being realistic with myself.”
Niamh explains the joy of releasing new music for her is performing it to a live audience, “It’s the best feeling and I think I’ll be chasing it for the rest of my life.” And that’s a feeling that ‘Come As You Are’ will help her tap into. It’s an album which is a confident step forward, full of songs with the spark to come alive on stage and with the immediacy to beckon newcomers into her world.
Pre-order Niamh Regan’s album ‘Come As You Are’, out May 2024 via Faction Records.
https://irishmusicmarket.com/collections/niamh-regan
‘Belly’ by Niamh Regan, is out now : https://bfan.link/NRBelly
UK TOUR DATES 2024
April 2 nd – Hug & Pint, Glasgow (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 3 rd – Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 4 th – Cardigan Arms, Leeds (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 5 th – The Engine Room, North Shields (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 7 th – The Folklore Rooms, Brighton (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 8 th – SJQ (Servant Jazz Quarters), London (with Christof Van Der Ven)
April 9 th – Gulliver’s, Manchester (with Christof Van Der Ven)
IE TOUR DATES (FULL BAND) 2024
November 14th – Cyprus Avenue, Cork
November 15th – Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
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