MO LÉAN, the 2024 album by Fermanagh-born, Dublin-based composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist RÓIS, aka Rose Connolly, will be reissued following her signing to Domino Records. The album will be remastered and include a brand-new track, “PORT NA H-EALA”.
In Christian Wethered’s review, he opens: Like Landless, Lankum, John Francis Flynn, et al., she’s repurposed history and given it wings. And this is ancient, pre-Christian stuff– with the kind of sounds you don’t hear every day.
MO LÉAN is a tribute to, and reimagining of, the pre-Christian tradition of ‘keening’. Like charismatic meditation or talking in tongues, grieving becomes the griever. Language deconstructs into ritual…RÓIS’ voice is astounding – one that will often quiver, as though circling a trauma…
He concludes: MO LÉAN is a masterful album– with incantatory soundscapes that leave you for dead.
To mark this latest news, RÓIS shared a visceral performance of “WHAT DO YOU SAY (LIVE FROM A WAKE)”. As highlighted in the latest press announcement: Conjuring the ghosts of old Ireland through the sean-nós style is amplified by RÓIS’s immersive live shows, where she performs dressed in black, her face covered by a veil, a symbol of anonymity, grief and a reminder of the keener’s role to mourn a body and guide their soul to their next stage. On the consideration poured into her live shows, RÓIS notes: “I wanted to do something more conceptual. I wanted to set the gig at a funeral. There were accounts that, in Pagan times, the Wake would have been a debaucherous affair [watch “Did ye ever get The Ride at The Wake House?”]. I wanted to bring that to my music and the show because I think we need to unsterilise how we see death and how you have to be mannered.”
MO LÉAN won Album of the Year at the Northern Ireland Music Prize and was shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize. Praise for RÓIS’s idiosyncratic style continued throughout 2025 with “CAOINE” being named Best Original Folk Track at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards, where she also took home the Best Emerging Artist award.
Upcoming live dates:
17th November – ICA, London Tickets
3rd December – Union Pool, Brooklyn, NY Tickets
Presale from today via RÓIS’s mailing list, general sale from Friday 2nd Oct 10 am local time
MO LÉAN will be available on clear vinyl, CD and digitally. Pre-order: DomMart | Digital
Watch RÓIS’s collaboration with rob mulhern, aka hhh: