Mo Léan: Róis makes grief loud again

Mo Léan is an album about Irish funeral rites that behaves like a night out. Róis is a composer and singer from County Fermanagh, and she built her second record out of keening, then ran it through samples and distortion until the grief had a pulse. Self-released in 2024, it gets its first global pressing from Domino next month, expanded, and it still doesn't sound like anyone else.

Her name is Rose Connolly, and the biography explains the record better than most. She grew up in Newtownbutler, in the south-east of Fermanagh, surrounded by Irish traditional music: a grandfather on the pipes, a father on the accordion, older brothers handing her Daft Punk and Nirvana. She studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin and at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and it was in the Netherlands that she started taking Irish seriously, having not grown up speaking it. Uisce agus Bean, her 2023 debut, was the first run at this material. Mo Léan is the one that brought a Choice Music Prize nomination and a Domino deal signed in September. She also holds the Northern Irish Music Prize for Album of the Year, and two RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards, for Best Emerging Artist and Best Original Folk Track.

Keening is the source and the subject. Róis samples and reinterprets it, lifts a fragment from an Alan Lomax field recording, and lets Catholic hymnody and the tolling of the Angelus bell move through the record. She wrote and produced the album, co-produced it with John Murphy, and handed it to Darragh Mac Dónaill and Tailtiu to mix and Apu Nanu to master; Kylièn Sarino Bergh made the artwork. On stage she sings behind a black lace veil. What she says she is after is freedom: 'It’s [about] expression of freedom and questioning what are the shackles that bind us and keep us indoors.' Also, plainly, a good time. 'I want to party and to have the craic. That’s where I’m at.'

The sound is easier to hear than to describe. One voice carries all of it, gentle in a phrase and torn open in the next, closer to a scream than a note where the album wants it. Around that sit drones, distortion and, every so often, a bell. Nine tracks, just under twenty-seven minutes, and it moves like a service. Róis holds grief for individuals and grief for what Ireland lost to colonialism and the Catholic Church in the same frame, and the record never tips into a wake or a lecture.

'What Do You Say' opens at just over five minutes and takes its time setting the room before 'Angelus 1' rings through it. 'Cití' lands between the second bell and 'Caoine', the track that names the practice outright and holds it past five minutes. Then comes 'Oh Lovely Appearance of Death', a sixteenth century hymn about leaving for a better place, placed right next to 'The Death Notices', thirty-seven seconds in which Róis plays the local radio announcer apologising that today there are no deaths to report. It is the driest joke on the record and it lands.

The payoff is 'Feel Love'. It starts down in the grunge and climbs to a crescendo that sounds like euphoria, the narrator delighted from beyond the grave, and it reframes everything before it: death as the moment the shackles come off. The expanded edition closes with 'Port na h-Eala', urgent and old at once, the voice at full stretch, hard to place next to anything else on the shelf.

Anyone who has been told not to cry at a funeral should hear this album, and so should anyone following the vocalists Róis names as touchstones, Meredith Monk and Hatis Noit among them. A listener who needs a chorus will find little to grip: these songs build without repeating. The one real cost is the bells: 'Angelus 1', 2 and 3 add up to barely two minutes, and they land like a skit between songs that already mark their own time.

Mo Léan earns a four. The number is for the execution: a voice with real range, a production with teeth and enough humour to stop the grief turning pious. Keening went quiet in Ireland about a century ago. This makes it loud again, and worth the volume.

The tracklist

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