Since 2014’s Cold Old Fire, Lankum’s debut album as a four-piece, the Dublin band have gone on to release three studio albums on Rough Trade Records – including The Livelong Day and False Lankum, which both won the Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year. Lankum released a live album, Live in Dublin, in June 2024.
They were set for a North American autumn 2025 tour, but had to cancel due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’.
It’s an honour to be releasing a version of this iconic tune, and it feels eerily relevant to be referencing yet again themes of urban decay, economic hardship and working class frustration. – Lankum
Most recently, their track ‘The Granite Graze’ off of their 2017 record Between The Earth and Sky, was featured on Netflix’s House of Guinness soundtrack, which premiered last month.
The Dublin doom-folk favourites crown a momentous year with a magnificent assault on the senses and a set rich in hypnotic tales of woe
Roundhouse, London
By Kitty Empire
The Dublin doom-folk favourites crown a momentous year with a magnificent assault on the senses and a set rich in hypnotic tales of woe
Outside, brightly dressed people head to festive functions. Inside the often dimly lit north London venue, the focus is more on death and suffering.
To be clear, no audience members are physically harmed tonight by Lankum’s mantric take on traditional Irish music – although the Dublin foursome’s often confrontational acoustics are part of their considerable appeal. It’s the songs that tell of murders (multiple) and suicides (at least two), of grief and dread. There are mutinies at sea (the traditional The New York Trader). On land, travails are rife, nowhere more so than on Rocky Road to Dublin. Lives blighted by addiction regularly stud the band’s set list, which mixes originals, covers and avant-garde rearrangements of folk songs. This is their biggest ever show to date – a sold-out 3,000 capacity – the culmination of a year that saw the release of Lankum’s fourth and most assured album, False Lankum. That record made them, briefly, favourites for the Mercury prize (which went to Ezra Collective); it has ended 2023 with high rankings in many albums of the year lists.
Folk music has always been gristly with suffering. Featuring several vocalists who each play several instruments, Lankum have made their name retelling these old tales of woe with compassion and no little anger. For the band – named after the traditional song False Lankum, a variant of Child Ballad No 93, in which terrible things happen to a baby – ancient afflictions remain horrifyingly contemporary.
Take The Wild Rover, their mesmeric set opener, drawn from their 2019 album The Livelong Day. Thought to have its origins in the 17th century, the tune has travelled widely as a drinking song; it’s a chant with Celtic away fans. Sung by the hypnotic Radie Peat, with meaty harmonies from the rest of the band, the Lankum version foregrounds the bitter regret at having wasted on drink the riches that could have bought “10 acres”, a roof and warm clothing.
Ian Lynch on uilleann pipes. Photograph: Sonja Horsman/The Observer
Even sadder is Lankum original The Young People, a song introduced as being “about the frailty of human life”. Sung by guitarist Daragh Lynch, it starts with someone “swinging” (from a rope) and reminds us, with close harmonies and a pileup of instruments, that life is very short. There’s time, too, for expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people tonight. Lynch pointedly asks the guffawing audience how it’s going, us having a new king.
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a couple of singers who’ve devoted themselves, in slightly different ways, to keeping traditional music alive: Shirley Collins and Radie Peat.
Collins is 88, and she’s had a pretty strange and incredible career. She started performing traditional songs in the mid-1950s, and she notably left England in 1959 to travel the United States with Alan Lomax, recording songs and singers in Appalachia and elsewhere that may otherwise have been lost to history. She recorded some incredibly influential records in the ’60s and ’70s with Davy Graham and, separately, with her sister Dolly Collins. And then Shirley left music entirely. It wasn’t until the 2000s that unlikely underground musicians would coax her back to performing: British apocalyptic-folk-industrial band Current 93 were the first, strangely. It wasn’t until 2014—38 years after her last album—that Collins made a new one, and it was gorgeous and well received. She’s since released a couple more, all for the hip Domino label, fitting for someone who’s been so quietly influential. Her latest is Archangel Hill; check out “Hares on the Mountain”
Radie Peat, singer for Lankum, is one of the many musicians who’ve been deeply influenced by Collins—and by the traditional songs that Collins helped to keep alive. But while Lankum is definitely part of the folk tradition, they modernize the sound in wildly interesting ways. Their fourth and latest album is called False Lankum, and I love this quote about it from Mojo Magazine: “If modern folk music needs its own OK Computer, its own The Dark Side of the Moon, or indeed its own F♯A♯∞, this may well be it.” (That last album referenced, in case you didn’t recognize it, is the debut from Godspeed You Black Emperor.) If that all sounds intriguing, you’ll probably love it. Oh, and the album was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize. [ . . . ]
Peat describes this conversation as “fangirling,” though I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. There’s definitely some mutual admiration happening here—Collins still keeps up with music, and she loves Lankum as well. They talk about Collins’ adventures in America with Alan Lomax, about other singers they admire, and how they share a pretty strong hatred for jazz. Enjoy.
Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Shirley Collins and Radie Peat for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform, and check out all the goodness at Talkhouse.com. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!
