120 West and 69th Street, New York, reads an online flyer for the show. The red pin lands on Manhattan’s Christ and St. Stephen’s Church, formed in 1975 through the union of two congregations following the urban clearance that paved the way for the city’s renowned Lincoln Center. The quaint little church, stained-glassed, red-carpeted, vaulted arches and pews aplenty, may seem an unlikely venue for Ciarán’s solo return – formerly known as ‘Bearface’ of the now-disbanded group Brockhampton – except not when the space represents precisely what he wants to project: new ground and new beginnings.
As one of 13 (yes, 13) in the band – which heaped a wider creative team in with vocalists and producers – Ciarán’s comeback was especially well-awaited. Hailing from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he spent the group’s early years flying back and forth to Texas and lending his vocals to tracks that built towards his signature, soaring closers. , three albums produced and released in quick succession over just six months in 2017, launched Ciarán and co to instant critical and commercial success. Immortalised in the was a summer of stunts, breakneck momentum and beats that a generation of now mostly-20-somethings will scarcely forget. I mean, I dare you to try to forget the siren-laced production of “BOOGIE” alone.
When the band broke up in 2022, their contract with RCA required them to deliver a final “35 minutes of music”. The resulting album ‘The Family’, however, only featured boisterous founding frontman Kevin Abstract on vocals and Ciarán on production. “I’m back and ready, Ciarán had to bring it out me,” Abstract spits. Despite rapper Ameer Vann’s shock exit in 2018, the members’ spirits weren’t completely dulled. By the time their true last album ‘TM’ arrived – a final finger to the industry reminiscent of Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’ – they were ready to work on projects of their own.
I now catch Ciarán in Brooklyn and after an almost half-decade hiatus, he reflects on those years: “Being a part of a group for so long, my view on it was to be completely in service of the group. It was very much not about me.” Among the more mouthy members, Ciarán fell back and remained comparatively elusive. There was little room for anything else, he explains. “People’s life stories are always very complicated and in a group, there was a very narrow window to go into the nuances of it. So I would always just leave it alone. Whatever the song needs, I’m gonna do that.”
With the release of ‘Róisín’, his debut solo album – somewhere between D’Angelo and Dijon – that instinct hasn’t entirely disappeared. The album, while not overtly autobiographical, offers glimpses of the man behind the mutters. Named after what would have been his middle name, ‘Róisín’ (Irish for ‘little rose’) is rapt in references to home. They surface in subtle yet deliberate ways, from the title of dreamy interlude “Claddagh”, a reference to the traditional Irish symbol of love, loyalty and friendship, to the Uilleann pipes, otherwise known as Irish bagpipes, that score the closing track, “Waterslide”. Both tell of a cultural identity that, with distance, has only grown more meaningful.
“My identity was the band. I came to America literally just for the band, so I wasn’t really taking time by myself, just existing in a new country and it started to really sink in,” he reveals. “The older I got, I started to realise all the things that I would take for granted. Growing up in Belfast, down to things like nature, the way people are, a sense of humour, culture. A lot of those things, I just started to really miss over the past few years and gradually, those feelings kind of snowballed.” The music video for ‘Houston‘ even sees him among friends belting the song in an Irish pub in New York.
Speaking with him, I’m struck by just how American he sounds. He has a deep (in tone, not nativeness) East Coast accent, punctuated with the occasional Northern Irish inflection that turns “flour” into “floy-er”. Nearly a decade of living in the States will do that, he says. “It’s just a complete mess. It’s funny, whenever I’m hanging out with friends from back home, they’re always like, ‘Jesus, what happened?’”
And then there’s the name change. Although Ciarán tells me he had been sitting on the album for nearly two years, the decision to abandon his artist/producer moniker, Bearface, for his real first name came easily. But the reason for not doing so sooner? Knowing, with certainty, that people would mispronounce it. See-ah-ran? Sierra-n? “Now I’m just like, who cares?”
That willingness to let things be a little uncomfortable is in how he’s introducing ‘Róisín’ to the world. He made a point of keeping his first show at the Christ & St. Stephen’s Church phone-free and performing the album in full roughly a month before its release. “I thought it would be cool for some people’s first experience with the album to be in a live setting because it’s so instrument-heavy.” The arrangement called for a fairly DIY set-up: a 10-piece band with synths, loop machines, guitars, cellos and Uilleann pipes for the closer (keep up), alongside frequent collaborators Roy Blair and boylife also joining the imaginably crowded stage.
The no-phones policy was equally deliberate. “I didn’t want that to be people who weren’t there’s first experience they hear, from someone’s fucking phone or whatever,” Ciarán said. What he hadn’t anticipated was how much the absence of screens, particularly in so spiritual a space, would change the atmosphere. “I think I’m just so used to environments where everyone is on their phone, so it was a nice benefit that people would just sit there like, ‘All right, I gotta fully listen. I don’t get to record this and listen to it back, so I’m gonna take it in right now.’”
Releasing ‘K-Bar‘ as the album’s lead single was, in retrospect, a nifty way to upend any expectations people might have brought to ‘Róisín’. Even the title wrong-foots expectant listeners, as the single opens with bass-boosted, jumbled samples before hard-cutting to pillowy-soft, mellow acoustic guitar. Ciarán laughs, “I wasn’t trying to be purposefully obnoxious. But I definitely didn’t want people to feel like they knew what they were expecting.” Drawing heavily from the sensuality of Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend”, Ciarán is at home in his characteristic falsetto, stacked harmonies and airy runs, revealing the student of R&B he really is. He sings: “I’ve been thinking I could watch you dance, just for a while / Singing, ‘You’re the same, my candy rain’,” quoting Soul for Real’s 1994 hit.
On the album’s central influences, he doesn’t overcomplicate it: “Definitely D’Angelo and Prince.” He first encountered D’Angelo at around 17, scouring the internet for music he hadn’t yet encountered. Prince, meanwhile, came much earlier, courtesy of his mum. “I remember her playing me ‘Kiss’ as a kid.” In fact, he credits her as his earliest tastemaker. “My mum was always huge into R&B,” he tells me. “She was always playing Lauryn Hill, Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child, TLC – those are her favourites.” Beside those formative influences, Ciarán found himself bumping the hell out of Congo Natty’s jungle album ‘Blackstar’ while making Róisín, he tells me. “I was obsessed with it while I was working on the album.” The genre’s restless rhythms and dub-inflected production feature sporadically on his debut. “That’s why I use a lot of tape delay and dub songs and a lot of samples and things. It’s influenced by jungle music, here and there.” It’s an eclectic mix but these touchstones somehow find their place in the album’s universe.
The same instinct governs the visual world of ‘Róisín’. The ‘Galvarino‘ video – made by Ciarán – is a reel of shit-post-y footage of Theragun sessions, simulated car crashes and other seemingly disconnected fragments. “I could maybe post-rationalise it in a way, but I wouldn’t say there’s a direct link at all. I was just grabbing a bunch of shit I gravitated to and putting it together, but there’s a coherence to it that I didn’t intend going in.” As any English teacher who’s ever insisted that the curtains are blue because the author is sad might put it, sometimes the meaning arrives without intention. Not every whale, on first read, needs to stand for the unknowable depths of the human soul.
But now that he’s stepping out solo, Ciarán admits he’ll need to warm to a different kind of exposure: “I mean, it’s still very uncomfortable in a lot of ways for me,” he said. “I’m just a very awkward, reserved person. I definitely feel like I’ve opened up more than I ever had before. But, yeah, I don’t know if it’s something that I’m ever gonna be comfortable enough with.”
Still, he hopes listeners will meet the album with a similar willingness to sit with the unfamiliar. “Those are my favourite kinds of albums, where initially there are parts I don’t like, and then as time goes on, the parts I didn’t like end up becoming my favourite thing. I feel like it challenges me a little bit. Not to put it in such wanky terms, but… I hope it’s something that people want to spend time with.”
‘Róisín’ is out now.