Radie Peat has announced her debut solo album, No Human Tongue Can Tell, to be released via Rough Trade Records on November 13th (pre-order here). Best known as a member of Lankum and one quarter of ØXN, Peat has shared a new album single, The Moon and Stars, alongside news that, following her sold-out Union Chapel show in London (on November 3rd), she will now play an additional London date at the Barbican on May 19th, 2027 and a show at La Trabendo in Paris on February 1st 2027; tickets for the two new dates go on sale Friday (September 18th) at 10am (all dates below).
On the folk song, The Moon and Stars, she rewrote parts of the lyrics; she now sings, “I wish I’d never seen your face or heard your lying tongue.” “There are coded references to unwanted pregnancies and abortions within the song,” she says, “as well as references to rue, a herb which was used to cause miscarriage. I wanted to represent these experiences from the woman’s perspective – to connect us with her experience.” For those that may recall, Radie was also a member of a short-lived Irish folk trio called Rue, alongside Cormac Mac Diarmada of Lankum and Brian Flanagan. They released a cover of Katie Cruel, a well-known folk song of a woman rejected by society, and described as one of the most stark, claustrophobic laments in folk music. Radie’s The Moon and Stars may very well be a contender for first place.
She traces another line to Irish theatre. “When I wrote the lines that refer to screeching and roaring, I was recalling the final scene of John B. Keane’s 1959 play, Sive.” In that play, a young woman drowns herself in a bog hole rather than accept an arranged marriage. Peat folds the moment’s despair into her own chorus: “Never… if the sun, moon and stars rained down out of the heavens and split the ground under my feet… never!”
Watch the accompanying video, directed by Peter Eason Daniels.
The album’s nine songs draw on female struggle and endurance, and on love. Its tracklist includes “Still I Love Him,” the traditional song Peat released as her debut solo single in July, which KLOF covered on release (John Francis Flynn discovered it in the Irish Traditional Music Archives). Peat traces the album’s origins back further still. “When I was in my 20s I watched a documentary on Mike Oldfield making Tubular Bells and the idea just stuck that I would like to try record like that, where you write and play all the intersecting parts,” she says. “I found the idea of being limited by your own mind and abilities, with all the blind spots and personal preferences, very appealing.” She thanks producer John “Spud” Murphy, who also worked on ØXN’s CYRM: “without his talent and patience it simply wouldn’t exist.”
Peat’s route here runs through two of the most talked-about Irish records of recent years. KLOF’s Thomas Blake wrote of Lankum’s Mercury- and Ivor Novello-nominated False Lankum: “Sprinkled throughout the album are three short fugues that act like the chapter breaks in a Godard film… 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.” Of ØXN’s CYRM, on which Peat sings alongside Katie Kim, Eleanor Myler and Murphy, 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… This uncompromising debut album is like a monolith looming through fog.”
One of the most notable references in the press for the new album that caught my attention was how Peat was creating a moment where one woman’s voice represents the voices of many through the ages, or as she describes it, ‘communicating hundreds of years of other people’s experiences, that have been absorbed into the songs from generations and generations before you – binds you with a worldliness beyond the sum of your own experience’.
This already feels like an energised, vital addition to this year’s album releases, and I’m sure, based on what I’ve heard to date, many well-deserved accolades will follow.
Tracklisting
- Hares on the Mountain
- The Moon and Stars
- Willow Garden
- Luisne
- Same Old Man
- Dark Hore on The Wind
- Still I Love Him
- Bonnie Boy
- Cailín Deas
Pre-Order/Save: https://radiepeat.ffm.to/human
Radie Peat Live Dates
November 3rd 2026 – Union Chapel, London, UK – SOLD OUT
November 20th 2026 – Vicar St., Dublin, IE
January 31st 2027 – Paradiso, Amsterdam, NL
February 1st 2027 – La Trabendo, Paris, FR
May 19th 2027 – The Barbican, London, UK