Seamus Fogarty

2020’s A Bag Of Eyes, and road-tested while on tour with Lisa O’Neill around Ireland and the UK, the enthusiastic response of audiences to his new compositions convinced Seamus to enlist the help of a range of esteemed collaborators, old and new, to bring this latest collection of songs to life. Recorded at studios in London, St Leonards-on-Sea and Margate and fine-tuned in his own home studio in Walthamstow, the list of collaborators includes string-arranger and multi-instrumentalist Emma Smith (Pulp, Beth Gibbons), drummers Chris Vatalaro (Anohni, Radiohead) and Aram Zarikian (Grasscut), and horns player Joe Auckland (Madness, Oasis). Additional production and engineering came from Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins) and Mike Lindsay (Tunng, Lump), while Abrahams also mixed the album.

Seamus Fogarty hails from County Mayo in the west of Ireland, and was raised on Irish folk music and experimental electronica. His songs are a strange and hearty stew, taking traditional structures and compositions and amping up, warping, distorting, and misshaping them with layers of electronic dissonance and interference, found-sound spoken-word samples and other assorted rogue audio curio. “I began playing the tin whistle when I was four ,” says Seamus, “took up the guitar when I was ten, learning all of the album Use Your Illusion 2 by Guns N’ Roses off by heart. From there I moved on to Smog, Palace Brothers and John Fahey before leaning back into the Irish folk music of my youth and devouring my parent’s collection of early Autechre records.”

Seamus’s 2012 debut album God Damn You Mountain received widespread critical acclaim and was hailed by the Irish Times as “one of the best Irish albums of recent years”. It was re-released in 2014 by Lost Map and reissued again by the same label in 2025, on occasion of its 10th (ish) anniversary. 2015’s Ducks and Drakes EP was similarly acclaimed (“lovely folk reveries” ???? – MOJO). It led to Seamus releasing a pair of exceptional albums via Domino Records – 2017’s The Curious Hand (“magical amplified folk journeys through modern life” ????? – The Guardian; featuring the track ‘Van Gogh’s Ear’ which was voted 90th best song of 2017 by The Guardian) and 2020’s A Bag Of Eyes (“explores many musical possibilities” 8/10 – musicOMH.com). Released by Lost Map in 2023, the Hee Haw EP presented five more playfully screwed-up songs, each as fresh as the day and yet somehow old as the hills.

Seamus’s new album Ships begins with ‘Come Down To The Square’, an urbanite distant cousin of his earliest pastoral songs, rooted not in found sounds from the Irish countryside, but the babble and buzz of central Walthamstow, complete with God-fearing street preachers and impassioned stall holders, all set to a backdrop of droning synth and chiming banjo. Motorik-folk fusion ‘Fire’ revisits a clutch of old verses found buried in a phone and dismissed in the moment for being “too simple and honest” before being reignited by an unlikely combination of instruments from Moog synthesiser to tin whistle, masterfully turning something that “started out a bit introspective,” says Seamus, “into something quietly inspirational”. The album’s title track and emotional centrepiece ‘Ships’ takes its unabashedly romantic chorus from a Tracy Emin neon artwork on Margate harbour, and sails on a breeze of sweeping, delicately detailed progressive pop worthy of prime Brian Wilson.

A dolorously funny spoken word lament set to queasily de-tuned guitar chords and wheezing synths, Cillian Murphy’s favourite Seamus Fogarty song ‘They Recognised Him’ previously appeared on the Hee Haw EP, and reappears here in remastered form (by Christian Wright at Abbey Road Studios). The woozy, waltzing ‘Woking’ takes in a range of disparate influences from 19th century Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov to communal can-drinking on trains with elderly strangers and might just be the strangest song ever written about the Surrey town on the Southwestern Main Line. ‘The Last Days of Watchmaker Joe’, inspired by the curious story of a man who built his own coffin using no nails nor screws, is set to the ominous backdrop of Aram Zarikian’s relentless rhythms, Emma Smith’s squealing violas and Fogarty’s own guttural howling. “I really needed to get that out of me,” Seamus admits, “I’m much calmer since.” Of the final track, the album’s glorious crescendo ‘Doer Undoer’, he says: “I kind of wanted it to be a two-fingers to the doubters and to the doubt inside of myself.”

“I think there’s a few miserable songs on there for sure – obligatory at this stage,” says Seamus of Ships, “but to my mind there’s something strangely uplifting about this collection, more so than anything I’ve released before. I know I have it better than most people but I still find it hard to persevere and keep going and that’s probably the main theme of the album. It’s honest in a way that my other albums haven’t always been, which is why I’m so sure it’s going to be a massive hit.”