Music

A Beginner’s Guide to Bravery is a remarkable release from David Keenan, showcasing his effortless, ambitious talent. “I had a dream that James Dean was alive and well today / looking for the quiet life / working for Irish Rail,” Keenan…

Dundalk native Video Blue (Jim O'Donoghue Martin) is back with a new record, Night Painting. Arriving at the tail end of 2019, the album comes two years after his debut full-length release, Love Scenes. Recorded in studios around London,…

Movie plots aren’t always straightforward. Nonlinear narrative has featured in film for almost a century, effectively conveying stories out of sequence for a more captivating, provocative plot. Some of the most iconic, and arguably best,…

"Someone must have blessed us when he gave us those songs…" New Yorker James Richard Steinman, more commonly known as Jim Steinman, is the zeitgeist figure of AOR (album-oriented rock). Steinman exploded onto the music scene in 1977,…

Post-punk as a term is both vague and misleading. It grew in tandem with the initial punk rock movement of the ‘70s, as opposed to being born out of it. It kept the DIY work ethic but thrived on sonic experimentation and a broader range of…

One final list to round out the year and, indeed, the decade. The end-of-year lists were tough to narrow down, so the task of picking just a few albums from an entire decade of music was straight-up Herculean. Inevitably, we had to leave…

Another year, another list. Here at HeadStuff we've taken a simple approach to the selection process—just picking our own personal favourites. There were some close calls and a few artists can count themselves unfortunate to narrowly miss…

It’s undeniable that 2019 has been a great year for Irish music. Many of the artists included below have found themselves on international end-of-year lists from huge publications. Others have delivered such promising debuts that they could…

The debut album is a statement of artistic creativity, intended to launch a musician's career proper. Not all hit the ground running, however. Even the most important bands in history don't always deliver great debuts. The Beatles debut…

Xi.me.na Borges, a Venezuelan/New York experimental artist, is an award-winning composer and performer. Melding old and new via the use of digital and analogue tech, she also blends music from different eras. The result is a body of work…