Radie Peat has released her debut solo single, Still I Love Him, via Rough Trade Records, with a video directed by Robbie Mailler Howat. Best known as a member of Lankum and the quartet ØXN, Peat officially steps out on her own for the first time here, taking a traditional love song and rebuilding it around her contralto.
The song reached her through John Francis Flynn, who found this version in the Irish Traditional Music Archives, wrote a new melody for it, and passed it on with a view to foregrounding its female narrator. Peat folded that melody into her own layered vocal arrangement. “I like indirect,” she says. “I don’t like being too explicit and I wanted the freedom to make decisions around my voice without having to explain myself.” Building and harmonising her voice for atmosphere, she describes what she was after as “creating emotional connection… I’m trying to capture the elation and devastation that can accompany obsessive love.”
She found the song’s archival home unsettling. “John discovered the song in an archive titled ‘True Love’,” she says. “I found that so dark – even though you suffer – because of the amount you love someone – you stay, you carry on.” Still I Love Him holds both sides at once: the elation, then the slow erosion that comes when devotion meets increasingly poor treatment. Peat set a difficult partner’s escalating behaviour to “minor chords and sombre tones”, then let the chorus swell — “brimming and gushing with romance”, she says, carried by the vocals and the strings.
Peat’s route to a solo single runs through two of the most talked-about Irish records of recent years. Lankum’s Mercury- and Ivor Novello-nominated False Lankum drew this from KLOF’s Thomas Blake: “Sprinkled throughout the album are three short fugues that act like the chapter breaks in a Godard film… like little musical puzzles, ways to engage the listener more actively with the way the sounds are being created. In a way, they hold the key to Lankum’s highly individual approach to music-making: a discourse between band and listener that is challenging, raw, brutally honest and always rewarding.” As one quarter of ØXN, alongside Katie Kim, Eleanor Myler and John ‘Spud’ Murphy, she made CYRM, of which Blake wrote: “It’s this sheer ambitiousness and ØXN’s unwillingness to conform in any way to stereotypes that make them something of an outlier, even in a scene that is open to experimental music. It also makes them one of the most vital acts in that (or any) scene. This uncompromising debut album is like a monolith looming through fog.”
Peat plays three headline shows:
Radie Peat Live Dates
3rd Nov 2026 – Union Chapel – London – UK
20th Nov 2026 – Vicar St. – Dublin – IE
31st Jan 2027 – Paradiso – Amsterdam – NL
Pre-sale Thursday 9th July at 10am. General sale Friday 10th July at 10am.
Stream Still I Love Him: https://radiepeat.ffm.to/still