By Ed Power | Irish Times
Among the new wave of critically acclaimed Irish folk artists, it has been all too easy to overlook the Ye Vagabonds siblings, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn. Although their music has long had a beautifully rapturous quality, they lack the in-your-face wow factor of the Mercury-nominated drone punks Lankum or the storytelling charm of John Francis Flynn.
Their moment of recognition may at last be at hand with this stunning album for Geoff Travis’s River Lea label, a wonderfully vulnerable collection rooted in angst and woe but carried aloft by a poetic defiance.
Recorded in a house in Galway, All Tied Together is a powerfully raw listen that comes off as a sort of craggy Irish Simon & Garfunkel, the effect heightened by luminous harmonies and keening instrumentation.
Tender yet never maudlin, with diaristic lyrics about tragic break-ups and unfulfilled futures, it knits together the ancient and the modern with haunting verve. One moment you’re soaking up the turf‑fire glow of On Sitric Road, the opening track; the next the LP knocks you backwards with the dam‑busting instrumental refrain of The Flood.
Above all, it arrives as a blessed relief amid trying times for Irish traditional music. In one sense the genre has never been more acclaimed: Lankum headline festivals around the world; and the vampire caper Sinners, which has been nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars, including for its score, soundtracks a pivotal scene with a modern take on Rocky Road to Dublin, complete with Riverdancing undead.
But, as often happens in the music industry, the renaissance in trad has now been commodified. This has been brought painfully home over the past year with the existential horror that is Kingfishr’s Killeagh, an ode to the east Cork hurling team that marks the coming of age of the new “boggercore” genre.
Boggercore has been with us a while – it stretches, via the 2 Johnnies, right back to D’Unbelievables. But with Kingfishr and their sonic and sartorial clones Amble it came into its kingdom as a cynical dumbing down of the great strides made by traditional over the previous decade.
This isn’t to question anybody’s taste – people like what they like – or to pit, say, Lankum against Kingfishr. It’s merely to acknowledge that in every genre there comes a moment when the mainstream wants a piece of the action. That, alas, was trad’s fate in 2025 – to which we can only say, “Killeagh, nah, nah-nah”.
Without ever intending to, Ye Vagabonds offer some much‑needed spiritual respite from that bleak trend with the sublime All Tied Together. It’s as stark as a shriek, as murkily mysterious as bogwater and lit by a constant sense of curiosity and wonder.
The album also marks a new chapter for the duo, who were raised as Irish speakers in Carlow and went on to become embedded in Dublin’s folk underground.
Among their fans is the Boygenius singer Phoebe Bridgers, who asked for Ye Vagabonds to open for the indie supergroup in Dublin in 2023.
They pour all of those experiences into tracks such as Danny, a starkly modern tale of a young man unravelling in contemporary Ireland (“His girlfriend hit the needle … You could see that she was fading / By the shadows round his eyes”).
As with the best modern trad, the project constantly takes risks – on Gravity they fuse the melancholy of Irish folk with the menacing bite of postrock. The mood then swerves back to a-cappella pop on Mayfly, a tune that lives up to its name with its beautifully flitting evanescence.
A record full of cries and whispers ends with the hush of Forget About the Rain, which frames the siblings’ voices with gentle piano and guitar. It is heartbreakingly sad – as many of the songs here are – yet ultimately this is an album sure to fill its listeners with joy.
