Acclaimed Irish artist Fionn Regan returns with a new single Islands - the first taste of upcoming album O Avalanche, due out on 1 November via label group Nettwerk. Written in Mallorca and rippling like the sea, Islands uses images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. Buoyant and urgent, the song introduces his upcoming record’s world with a kind of classicist immediacy; it seems to arrive fully formed, as if the space it evokes is eternal.
'When I wrote the song it was like there was something cosmic about it, because it doesn’t sound like my other songs,' says Regan. 'I felt like it was almost a gift from The Beatles or whatever wellspring they drew on. I remember being in Mallorca and thinking, "Were The Beatles ever here?" Not that I’m saying it’s on their level but it has some sort of cosmic flow to it.'
Islands is Fionn Regan’s first new material since his sixth album Cala, which was released to universal acclaim in late 2019.
Fionn Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury Prize-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty Dogwood Blossom drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’ This Is England 86. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s The Meeting Of The Waters while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. 'I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,' says Regan.
