This week, the 7th RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards nominations were announced. The awards will again take place at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Wednesday 26th February at 7.45pm and will be broadcast live on RTÉ Radio 1 from 8pm. It will be hosted by RTÉ’s John Creedon. A television highlights programme will be broadcast on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Saturday 1st March.
It’s nice to see several artists that have featured on KLOF over the past year in the list, including:
Róis, for Best Orginal Track and Best Emerging Artist. We recently reviewed her album MO LÉAN, described in Chriatian’s review as a masterful album with incantatory soundscapes that leave you for dead. “It’s as though Bjork was actually from Fermanagh and got really into ‘keening’.”
Lemoncello ( ft. Laura Quirke and Claire Kinsella) for Best Original Track and Best Folk Album. Their self-titled album, released on the newly revived Claddagh Records, was described by Danny Neill as “one of those records that has a binding sound all the way whilst boasting an incredible range of tones, moods, and textures within each song. The sonic glue I refer to is a sort of ethereal, harmonious, ever-shifting sheen of a topcoat gliding across a tense, grinding underbelly of distortion and vibration. It is a juxtaposition that works so well…”
Joshua Burnside for Best Orginal Folk Track. The Belfast-based folk singer-songwriter signed to the Nettwerk label last year and has released several strong singles to date from his forthcoming new album “Teeth of Time” (the latest being Climb the Tower). The Good Life, which is up for nomination, was released his first double A-Side single from the album, backed with Marching Round The Ladies. In Burnside’s words, the album is “…about growing older, becoming a dad, getting by and making do. It’s about change and changeless mountains that silently watch as our short lives pass, ice sheets melt, loughs die and stars vanish. It’s about the haves and have-nots, the lucky and the damned. It’s about being stuck in traffic with a hangover, and doom scrolling at 3am. It’s about trees as gods in the imagination of a child, about lands divided, and never-ending wars fought under the banner of capitalism. It’s about Belfast, the north and about saying f*ck that to those that would divide us. It is about losing the ones we love and carrying on.”
Having won Best Folk Album in 2024 for False Lankum, ‘their most uncompromising album to date’, Lankum followed with Live in Dublin last year. In his review, Christian Wethered concludes: “The album is nothing if not heartfelt: a true record of a band at the peak of their powers.” Rocky Road to Dublin is up for the Best Traditional Folk Track. While they’ve been performing this traditional song for a few years now, this live recording has an undeniable energy and fervor that is impossible to resist:
Christy Moore is up for Best Folk Singer and Best Folk Album. Moore released ‘A Terrible Beauty‘ on Claddagh Records; it was reviewed by Dave McNally, who concludes “…the tenderness, empathy, solidarity, and absence of pretension never waver.” Moore also released his second-only music video for the album, the first being 1983’s ‘Don’t Forget Your Shovel’. The video for Boy in the Wild, which has clocked up over 80,000 views in two months, was directed and produced by Ellius Grace and stars BAFTA-nominated and IFTA-winning Irish actor Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones, 3 Body Problem, The Vault, Hunger, The Wind That Shakes The Barley) and the sensational IFTA-nominated young actor Ollie West (The Sparrow, The Listeners).
No stranger to these pages is Ríoghnach Connolly, who is up for Best Folk Singer. She’s often seen fronting Manchester legends Honeyfeet, delivering high-energy sets, while on the other end of the spectrum, performing alongside Stuart McCallum, “the yin to my yang,” is the deeper offering of Breathless. Their last album, ‘Land of My Other’ was a remarkbly personal album, produced by renowned composer/pianist Thomas Bartlett. It lived up to everything in her bio: Connolly writes the only way she knows how; a stream of poetic consciousness giving rise to honest, personal, heartfelt songs as likely to touch on childhood summers and first love as cultural dislocation, post-colonial injustices and grief. But it’s her deeply soulful, utterly engaging, stop-you-in-your-tracks voice – whether delicate and hushed or powerful and gutsy – coupled with Stuart’s understated brilliance and their exquisitely crafted songs, that give The Breath such emotional depth.
Landless are up for Best Folk Group. The quartet, featuring Lily Power, Meabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinead Lynch, delivered their strong debut album Bleaching Bones in 2018, described by Richard Hollingum as etheral and as an album on which subtlety and grace abound. Last year’s Lúireach, released on Glitterbeat, is a muti-faceted album filled with “beautiful, timeless moments.” Thomas Blake writes: “The Gaelic word Lúireach means a kind of armoured breastplate, but it can also be translated as a hymn sung for protection. This double meaning – the physical and the spiritual bound up in a single word – is a good way of beginning to understand the quiet beauty of Irish quartet Landless’s second album.” He concludes, “At the heart of Landless’s immense appeal is their talent as vocalists and harmonists. They have an uncanny ability for making a combination of two or more voices sound unearthly or joyous or resolved or sad, and the result is an album of apparent simplicity which in fact has countless different sides to it. Lúireach is a reliquary of rich, dramatic tales and a celebration of resolutely feminist togetherness, and it is yet another triumph for the fantastically productive Irish folk scene.”
Also up for Best Folk Album is John Spillane‘s epic two-hour Gaelic folk opera Fíoruisce – The Legend of the Lough. Dave McNally described the album as “epic storytelling, requiring a scale of ambition that few would contemplate” and that “It sits alongside such fine works as Peter Bellamy’s The Transports and Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown.” The album featured the voices of some of the most talented folk and sean nós singers, including Ríoghnach Connolly, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Niamh Farrell, Nell Ní Chróinín, and John Spillane himself of course.
Another deserving and KLOF Mag favourite, Niamh Bury, has been nominated for Best Emerging Artist. Her debut album, Yellow Roses, was released on Claddagh Records and, in the words of Danny Neill, is a record that can lead the charge for the Irish Folk scene at a time when the competition is fierce. This is no small accolade, but with an album this strong, it is an almost unavoidable statement.
In his review, he nailed the colours to the mast early on: Niamh Bury’s debut album is rich in ideas and fully occupied by able execution. The music is crafted imaginatively by a musical mind eager to unlock those rays of light in the sound that shine on each bar of music, subtly changing the colour and shape in ways that ensure there is never a dull moment, no periods where the listener will feel that the same ground is being covered. Yellow Roses is delightfully organic, too, proffering a hand-made feel that is so pivotal to great folk music that you can almost feel the impression of those guitar strings on your fingers as Niamh Bury chisels away at these songs. Then there is that voice on top of it all, strong in accent and pure in tone, a natural instrument rippling with youthful zest and yet simultaneously haunted by ancient ghosts; it results in these songs being sung with both conviction and grace.
There are many more deserving names nominated, so take some time to explore their music:
RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards Nominations 2025
Best Original Folk Track
Caoine – Róis
Chasing the Hare – Alannah Thornburgh
I’m for Gallipoli – Fiach Moriarty (feat. Damien Dempsey)
Old Friend – Lemoncello
The Good Life – Joshua Burnside
2024 Winner: Anáil na hOíche – Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin
Best Traditional Folk Track
Bean an Fhir Ruaidh – Diane Cannon
Helen of Kirkconnell Lea – The Half Room
Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye – Macdara Yeates
The Rocky Road to Dublin – Lankum
Welcome Home, Gráinne – Natalie Ní Chasaide & Iarfhlaith Ó Domhnaill
2024 Winner: Seán Gabha – Piaras Ó Lorcáin and Bláth na hÓige
Best Folk Singer
Cathy Jordan
Christy Moore
Macdara Yeates
Ríoghnach Connolly
2024 Winner: Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin
Best Folk Instrumentalist
Alannah Thornburgh
Diarmuid Ó Meachair
Macdara Ó Faoláin
Sinéad McKenna
2024 Winner: Aoife Ní Bhriain
Best Folk Group
Altan
Cuas
Keane Connolly McGorman
Landless
2024 Winner: Lankum
Best Folk Album
A Terrible Beauty – Christy Moore
Crankie Island Song Project – Cathy Jordan
Fíoruisce – The Legend of the Lough – John Spillane
Keane Connolly McGorman – Keane Connolly McGorman (self-titled)
Lemoncello – Lemoncello (self-titled)
2024 Winner: False Lankum – Lankum
Best Emerging Artist
Cuas
Niamh Bury
Róis
Seamas Hyland
Sinéad McKenna
2024 Winner: Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta
RTÉ RADIO 1 FOLK AWARDS HALL OF FAME
Róise Rua, a renowned singer from Árainn Mhór, Dún na nGall, will be inducted into the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards Hall of Fame on the night. Róise, who was also known as Róise na nAmhrán, passed on a rich heritage of folk music and preserved many songs that would otherwise have been lost, but have now travelled far beyond her home county.
Georgina Dudgeon, a relative of Róise Rua who has been involved in promoting and celebrating her great-grand-aunt’s legacy, will be among the guests of honour at Vicar Street, to accept the award on her behalf.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
The Lifetime Achievement Award winner for 2025 will be announced in February, in advance of the awards. Previous winners are Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill (2024), Mary Black (2022), Christy Moore (2021), Steve Cooney (2020), Moya Brennan (2019) and Andy Irvine (2018). (The RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards did not take place in November 2023, as they were rescheduled to February 2024).
In what promises to be a very special night celebrating Irish folk music, the awards will feature live performances from outstanding musicians such as Junior Brother, Niamh Regan, Landless, John Spillane’s Folk Opera Fíoruisce plus five-time Grammy award winner, Mary Chapin Carpenter and many more. RTÉ presenter John Creedon will again host the awards ceremony in front of a live audience.
A limited number of tickets for the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards are on sale now via www.ticketmaster.ie and are priced at €33.50 plus €1.50 venue facility fee.