Along the wild western coast of Ireland’s County Galway lies Connemara. Oscar Wilde once praised the region’s “savage beauty,” a phrase you will encounter at least a dozen times reading about its rugged expanses of mountain, bog, lake, and sea, to all of which its 30,000 or so residents appear proudly subordinate. Hovering the place on Google Maps takes you over craggy ranges and flowering heath, coral beaches and tiny fishing villages, ruins of castles and nunneries straight out of Gothic romance novels. Here the modern world bears a striking resemblance to the ancient world of myth.
Maria Somerville has described her debut album, 2019’s All My People, as a subconscious expression of a deep longing for home. The Irish musician wrote those songs—vague slips of murky slowcore that drew from Grouper’s muted drone-pop and the Irish folk ballads her uncles used to sing in pubs—while living in Dublin, where she had moved for school. But all the while she felt the pull of Connemara, where she was born and raised, and where she finally returned in 2020. Moving into a combination home and studio on the edge of Lough Corrib (the second-largest lake in Ireland), Somerville settled into a quieter way of life, which included regular walks through the windswept countryside and conversations with her father, a retired fisherman who shared with her the secrets of the trade, like the way a certain shimmer on the rocks portends rain. I wonder if it was a secret to her neighbors that Somerville had signed a deal with 4AD, or hosted a twice-weekly NTS show where she whispered morning greetings over gentle selections from Laraaji, Yo La Tengo, Durutti Column, Low, overlaid with field recordings of the rush of wind and sea.
Written and recorded during her time in Connemara, Somerville’s second album and first for 4AD, Luster, feels like an evolutionary leap akin to that of Cocteau Twins between Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas; the first was pretty, the second is sublime. Through a dense mist of shoegaze, post-punk, and ambient electronics, Somerville presents a dreamworld that is both mythic and real, a wild and ancient landscape in which her own figure is just barely perceptible. At the same time, you might consider it a deft and sweeping survey of all that “dream pop” can encompass—drawing lines from Mazzy Star to My Bloody Valentine to Broadcast to Julianna Barwick, settling comfortably alongside the masterpieces of the canon.
Taken one way, the songs on Luster are desolately lonely, beamed out into the bracing Connemara ether or directed towards a “you” that is nowhere to be seen. “Projections of you/In my head,” she sings huskily on the chorus of “Projections”; on “Stonefly,” she repeats, “Without you…” like a mantra over synth swirls that harken back to “hypnagogic pop.” Certain lyrical motifs resurface again and again—the sea, the sky, the path. The word “time” appears more frequently than I can count: On “Spring,” it comes in waves that ebb perpetually away, and on the breathtaking “Garden,” she swims through time itself, past dark caves and out toward warmer waters. Is she swimming forward in time, or back? A secret third direction, she clarifies: “Into.”
And yet Luster is the least insular of Somerville’s projects—perhaps excluding last year’s Princ€ss, the debut from the mysterious collective of the same name, of which Luster’s press notes reveal Somerville to be a contributor. (In retrospect, it isn’t hard to spot her fingerprints on songs like “Sometimes” and “In My Head.”) Where she recorded All My People for the most part alone, here she collaborates with a handful of mostly Irish musicians who fit into the mix so subtly you barely register they’re there: the harpist Róisín Berkeley on the starry-eyed “Réalt,” guitar from Connemara native Olan Monk on “Stonefly,” uilleann pipes from Lankum’s Ian Lynch tucked into “Violet,” plus broader contributions from Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald. Perhaps as a result, there is a holisticism to the hero’s journey on which Somerville embarks—a feeling that you’re not alone, especially when you are.
At times a lyric sheet is required to discern what Somerville is singing: The distinctly Grouper-esque “Halo” obscures a reverie of ancient Irish mysticism with thick clouds of reverb. Written out, Luster’s lyrics can feel a little unresolved: “I can see/More clearly than I could before/I know now/What’s true/For me,” from “Trip,” is a sentiment so simple it verges on trite. But that’s exactly the appeal of “Violet,” on which Somerville channels Carla dal Forno’s goth-folk romance, singing in the woolly way your voice sounds when you wake up: “Burden of life/Life is love/Love is time/Time is love/So many things in the air.” What could be sophomoric simply registers as true, then dissipates before the thought solidifies. “Everything is…” she sighs, but I can’t make out the rest, as if she’d traced the final word onto a steamy bathroom mirror. In any case, what matters is it’s spring, and wild strawberries are growing along the path outside her house.
Somerville presents Luster as a tale of homecoming, but a sad love story materializes at the margins. “I’ve got this broken heart…” she exhales on “Up” over a drumbeat so sedate it feels like time is standing still. Through a haze of layered vocals, I can pick out half the words—the sea, the sand, the soil, in which she plants her broken heart to be reborn as something new. Maybe you know the feeling—surrounded by the majesty of nature, projecting your own sorrows upon it. Then it all blurs together, and the waves come in to wash your footprints away.
