Junior Brother
We chat to Junior Brother, whose songs are known for veering between the intensely personal and the hotly political. On his third album, The End, the Dublin-based songwriter’s ragged and uncompromising delivery reaches new heights of unexpected beauty, strangeness and relevance. Throughout the interview, his answers to our questions were considered and wide-ranging.
To mark the release of Junior Brother’s highly anticipated new album “The End”, a further video from Ellius Grace has been shared for the stripped-back “Old Bell,” a “rickety lo-fi folk song that grapples with impending death. Junior Brother says: “‘Old Bell’ is a song that pushes back against the forces which pull the fit and young into a pit of no return”.
On Junior Brother’s third album, The End, Ronan Kealy displays real genius in the way he links ancient themes, such as the album’s underlying central motif of fairy forts, to our contemporary plight. “we can do nothing other than hang on his every word, words that slip from calm to fervid to agonised. It’s a journey we are willing to take again and again.”
Junior Brother has unveiled “A Lot of Love,” the potent final single from his forthcoming album, The End. The track showcases his unique ability to blend rich lyricism with a raw, expressive energy. Watch the accompanying chaotic single-take music video by Ellius Grace in which the protagonist reaches “an ecstatic nirvana, clutching six glasses of wine, passed out face-down in a plate of cold spaghetti.”
Taken from his forthcoming new album, The End, watch the Ellius Grace-Directed video for ‘Welcome to My Mountain’, the latest single from Junior Brother, one of Ireland’s most distinctive voices. Built on a hypnotic whistle riff, the track lurches through unpredictable time signatures, a sprawling beast mirroring modern unease and ancient myth, a headlong plunge into a darkly surreal topography.