It’s easy to forget that TRÚ – the Northern Irish trio comprising Michael Mormecha, Zachary Trouton and Dónal Kearney – only released their first album in 2021. That record, No Fixed Abode, arrived with such maturity and assuredness that it sounded like the effort of a group who had been honing their craft for years. Their subtle but incredibly distinctive sound, which rubs shoulders with traditional folk music while always keeping one foot in the present, is perhaps even more sharply defined on their follow-up. Eternity Near’s songs depict strange entanglements and vivid encounters with mortality with an aching clarity born of recent hardships, both global and personal.
The trio blur the lines between contemporary and traditional forms with such sleight of hand that it is sometimes difficult to discern whether a song is freshly minted, drawn from the archives or otherwise gleaned somehow directly from myth or nature. Opener Long Black Veil takes a country ballad written in the 1950s and injects it with the spirit of a newly discovered folk tale, the band walking the line between spookiness and melodrama with practised ease. The Ballad of Billy Jones – composed by the band – is a heartbreaking recollection of a relationship that endured through hardship but ultimately ended in sadness.
There are a host of traditional songs in the Gaelic language, including the softly rolling dTigeas a Damhsa, which, at barely a minute long, is gone almost before it begins but leaves you with a sweet and lasting impression. Is Fada Liom Uaim Í is laid-back, almost jazzy, but paints a melancholic picture with its beautifully sung lyrics, Trouton’s calmly adroit guitar and Mormecha’s soft, impressionistic percussion. Seán Bháin, by contrast, advances with a barely concealed energy, a pulsating romp, while Úirchill an Chreagáin, which ends the album, takes the form of a dialogue between a grieving poet and a fairy woman. Here, the accompaniment is sparse, allowing the voices to wander in and out of time and space, mirroring the song’s theme of the permeability of the boundary between this world and the next.
When it comes to the traditional songs, TRÚ travel far and wide in search of source material. A Red Red Rose is a sweetly-rendered adaptation of a Robert Burns poem. There is a beautiful version of Belfast singer Francis McPeake’s take on the well-known old Scots song Wild Mountain Thyme, with a melody that seems somehow more intoxicating than ever. The murder ballad Two Sisters is most surprising of all, taking on an electrified glam-country stomp.
Many of the most poignant moments, however, come in the self-penned songs. Selkie Song (Young O’Kane) attaches a shocking denouement to a familiar tale. It cloaks its weirdness and violence with a soaring chorus and Kearney’s striking, ethereal woodwind. Lovely Molly is a sweet, open-hearted love song with more than a hint of Paul McCartney about it that disguises a darker message, and Aphrodite is a brief, bare-boned breakup song, its minimal framework supporting a huge weight of emotion.
Although many of these songs are highly personal, it would be remiss not to situate them in the wider context of the times we live in – indeed, the band are keen to point out that the album’s aim is to look past endings to what lies beyond. It’s a scenario that leaves room for both hope and mystery and is an admirably mature move for a group of artists who are still near the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a distinguished career.
Order via Bandcamp: https://truband3.bandcamp.com/album/eternity-near