Niamh Regan set to play pop up show in Kilkenny

Critically acclaimed Galway artist Niamh Regan will perform a free pop up show at Rollercoaster Records on June 3 at 2pm to mark the release of her second album ‘Come As You Are’ on vinyl.

Niamh Regan’s 2020 debut album ‘Hemet’ introduced her as an artist with a gift for crafting folk-tinged songs with a quiet, reflective intensity. The release started to make waves and achieved over 1 million streams on Spotify and led to nominations for both the RTÉ Folk Awards and the Choice Music Prize ‘Album of the Year’. 

Since its release, Niamh has embarked on headline tours from Ireland, to UK, Australia, Spain + more. Pairing this with many festivals and a variety of support opportunities with artist such as CMAT, Villagers, John Grant, SOAK, Patrick Watson, Sam Amidon, Cormac Begley, and Sorcha Richardson.

In between her performances, Niamh began to write her second record in Attica Studios with producer Tommy McLaughlin.

"I arrived in Donegal to meet Tommy for the first time with a bunch of demos, half-baked ideas and feeling not ready, it was scary. But I’m so glad that I did it that way. Trusted the process and came into the studio with the intention of capturing exactly where I was with it all and Tommy helped me build from there," she said.

And here we are, with the release of that second album, titled ‘Come As You Are’. It’s an album full of acutely observed vulnerabilities and introspection. Its themes are the issues that many of us find loom large in the small hours: questions of self-doubt, uncertainty about your life’s direction, whether relationships are flourishing in the way you’d hoped and determining priorities. 

“A lot of it is about being in your late twenties and kind of realising we’re all running out of time,” she ponders. 

“I would have bouts of massive self-belief in the studio, and then in the next breath I would be like, ‘This is the worst piece of music I could have even imagined.’ It was a rollercoaster. But through that I found self-acceptance; this is where I’m at and making peace with that. That’s what the album essentially is, just making peace with where I’m at and being realistic with myself.”

Niamh’s goal for the record was to achieve a richer, full live band sound, inspired by her love of Julia Jacklin, Caroline Rose, and especially Wilco. While there are moments of intimacy, the songs on ‘Come As You Are’ are far grander in scale and ambition than those on ‘Hemet’: the rousing, string-assisted majesty of ‘Waves’, subtle electro-pop beats dancing at the base of the mix in ‘Nice’, the dreamy Petty-esque melancholic swirl of ‘Blame’, and standout track ‘Music’, which, if not for the expressive feminine elegance of her voice, could feel like a lost classic from Jeff Tweedy and co.

Niamh has a contagious passion for performing live, having recently completed tours of Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and supporting CMAT in the EU. Niamh explains the joy of releasing new music for her is performing it to a live audience.

“It’s the best feeling and I think I’ll be chasing it for the rest of my life.”

And that’s a feeling that ‘Come As You Are’ will help her tap into. It’s an album which is a confident step forward, full of songs with the spark to come alive on stage and with the immediacy to beckon newcomers into her world.