Co produced by Junior Brother and John “Spud” Murphy (who has worked with Lankum and ØXN), the record embodies raw acoustic textures and microscopic detail. Pipes, flute, bowed drone, harmonium, cello and percussion all emerge – defiantly stark and close mic’d. There is almost no reverb – space is created by restraint, tension, not to mention that grainy, demented voice.
This is not folk as comfort, nor even revival. It’s something more exposed and speculative - music that sits at the edges of legibility. The instrumentation draws from Irish traditional music; but instead of presenting it in full voice, Junior Brother filters everything through a kind of acoustic surrealism: reels stretch, flutes pierce, vocals hover between trance and testimony.
Opening track “Welcome to My Mountain” began as a slip jig riff that evolved into a dirge. Here, pipes descend as Junior Brother vocalises: “Down I fell and in I dived / I am lost / in the grinder.” The lyrics were taken from the UCD Folklore Collection's account of someone getting lost in a fairy fort, which becomes the record's central metaphor.
“Small Violence” trades hymnal lament for 70s folk horror. Inspired by The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the song foregrounds bowed drone and percussion over ominous pipes. Junior Brother describes the song as a meditation on misinformation – one that uses quiet repetition to trace its steps toward real harm. It all feels quite underhand and disconcerting: “From little word / to little hands / spreads small violence.”
Guitars are rare; incongruous, Bowie-esque harmonies appear and disappear. On “A Lot Of Love”, fractured melodic motifs flicker like brief embers in dry timber. The coda becomes increasingly unstable, veering toward abstraction. “Week End” loops the line “days and days and days,” lifted from a lockdown reflection, into a mantra rather than a chorus; at times, even the song’s attempt at levity becomes a looped burden.
“Start Digging” moves closer to ritual than song. “Start diggin’ till you see what living is,” he intones – a line that grows heavier with each repetition. The track becomes an excavation: worms, soil, and memory shifting just beneath the surface. There’s a quiet guilt here, a recognition of how much lies beneath us – fragile, teeming, overlooked. Heaney’s poem of the same name echoes in the background, as does North – another kind of cultural digging, where the act of unearthing becomes both personal and historical.
Final track “New Road” breaks into starker, more spacious territory. The organ is discordant, its reverb unusual for this otherwise dry and close-mic’d album. Joined by Ian Lynch’s uilleann pipes - the record’s only outside contribution – the track feels unmoored, like a slow planetary drift. “How high the old things grow / through many lives / so slow,” he sings, mourning the threatened rural landscape near his childhood home. It’s a devastating elegy – not just a farewell, but a quiet surrender to something too vast to resist. The song also echoes Joshua Burnside’s recent “Sycamore Queen” in its tone and thematic weight – both are haunted by environmental collapse, and the violence of progress buried under grief.
The End holds together through texture and intent. Where Pull the Right Rope was tangled and manic, and The Great Irish Famine laced with satirical bite, this album is colder, more stripped. The humour is gone, the vocals more detached. The intensity that once burned at the surface now lives under the soil.
The record offers little in the way of a hook, let alone resolution. But that refusal is the point. You don’t walk away humming these songs. If there’s a road out of the fairy fort, The End doesn’t take it.
