Kilkelly turns grief, myth and modern Ireland into a fiercely original world on 'Solip'

On his second full-length release 'Solip', Irish singer-songwriter Kilkelly delivers a bold, unsettling and richly imagined record that expands folk music far beyond its familiar boundaries. Rooted in storytelling but alive with theatrical tension, strange detail and flashes of genuine beauty, 'Solip' feels like the work of an artist refusing to make grief polite, predictable or easy to consume.

Its instrumental world is extraordinary, as sweeping strings and choral voices appear beside bowed banjo, shamisen, found sounds and percussion altered with coins. But these elements never feel included for novelty alone. Each unfamiliar texture adds to the record’s sense of instability, creating music that creaks, swells and shudders around the characters inhabiting it.

And that atmosphere is vital because 'Solip' is shaped by devastating personal loss. Several songs emerged after the deaths of three of Kilkelly’s close friends, and the emotional consequences of those experiences are present throughout. Yet this is not an album content to remain within private mourning. It examines how sorrow, shame, isolation and inherited damage move through communities and become part of a broader social condition.

Across the record, Kilkelly writes like a songwriter, dramatist and filmmaker at once, as the songs rarely feel confined to conventional structures. They develop like scenes, using changes in texture, pace and perspective to guide us through their emotional spaces.

There are echoes of Lisa O’Neill, Tom Waits and older folk and blues traditions, but 'Solip' is far too singular to be reduced to its influences. His writing carries a specifically Irish awareness of silence, guilt, storytelling and emotional inheritance, while his arrangements continually disrupt any expectation of what contemporary folk should sound like.

Most impressively, the album never treats darkness as decoration. Its unease has meaning. The strange instrumentation, unsettling characters and moments of near-theatrical collapse all serve a record concerned with what happens when people can no longer maintain the appearance of being fine.

Here, Kilkelly has made an album that feels fearless because it is willing to keep looking directly at grief itself. Dense, imaginative and emotionally uncompromising, 'Solip' is a remarkable piece of modern Irish songwriting that transforms loss into story, disorientation into sound and private sorrow into a world the listener can enter. It's difficult, beautiful and utterly absorbing.