A little under a decade ago, four out of the six players on were in a Cork City indie band called Little Indigo. Guitarist Peadar-Tom Mercier recollects that they “would have been the next Fontaines D.C.,” or something, but for one reason or another that didn’t happen. A different beast altogether is the group that rose from their ashes: Trá Pháidín are a band who could never be the next anything – but to you, they could be everything.

One of the most fiercely original groups operating in Ireland today, the ever-evolving ensemble both celebrate and subvert the nation’s musical traditions. Formed in 2019 in County Galway, a Gaeltacht heartland where the Irish language remains widely spoken, Trá Pháidín are a tentacular improv outfit whose organic soundscapes teem and wriggle with life. – which roughly translates as “stone and dry-stone wall” – is their sublime second album, and first for London label World of Echo, and sees them building on the pastoral post-rock tapestries of their 2023 debut An 424 to craft an inviting, earthy sound world that's wholly their own.

In the UK press, amidst something of a “green wave," there is a hunger for traditional Irish folk that, in one way or another, sounds modern, somehow. Trá Pháidín, of course, take great joy in absolutely fitting neatly into this box. They are a band for whom experimentation is effortless, and while traditional Irish folk music is definitely a part of their sound – the dislocated jig rhythms of “An Beál Bocht” and the yearning double helix of wind melodies on “To Hell or to Connacht” are testament to this – but it represents just a fragment of it, and a heavily recontextualised one at that.

The band aren’t trying to modernise a form rooted in tradition; rather, they are seeking to bricolage something novel, using as many different tools as they can lay their hands on. The folk-indebted melodies lilt beautifully into smoggy drones, impish jazz interplay, and writhing Afrobeat-inspired polyrhythmic percussion.

The world Trá Pháidín create is totally immersive and sublimely colourful; an experimental patchwork, where disparate styles are stitched together unexpectedly. They take this collage approach, too, to the Irish language. In the west of Ireland particularly, the language is entwined with the cultural identity, but Trá Pháidín aren’t interested in treating Irish like a static artefact – it’s something to play with, another thing to cut-and-stick onto the collage.

Most of the language here takes the form of bilingual field recordings, which mesh with the music as another jagged texture, sometimes spectral, sometimes comical. The band’s subtle sense of humour comes to the fore wherever music meets voice, and often Anglophone confusion is the punchline of their jokes. “Yeah, no,” says the first voice you hear, a Dubliner on the phone: “It’s great to get out of the city… Oh, there’s a guy, what’s 'hello' again? Dia dhuit?” – if that could talk…

All this is important, of course, but the great strength of is not its context, or the points you can draw from it about the Irish language and culture. Indeed, as with most music, its brilliance comes from how it sounds. The performances here are immense, and throughout, Trá Pháidín move as one. Fiddles and flutes harmonise to create tactile, smoky drones, whilst magnetic twin drummers Pól Ó Lionáird and Ruairí De Búrca ensure each composition has great dynamism and thrust.

“Garbhóg” is a six-minute kosmische scuttler that evokes the endless, rolling, verdant landscapes from whence it came, while “Fidín” immediately follows with a knotty, Minimalism-indebted cluster of fluttering wind harmonies. “Fothrach an Cheirtleáin” contains echoes of Gastr Del Sol in its splayed rock galumph, while curtain-lowerer “Dance Paddy Dance” sees all of Trá Pháidín’s players unleashing freewheeling solos at once, atop propulsive percussion. Intriguing and beautiful, but always fun and danceable.

Trá Pháidín are a band capable of subverting any and all expectations, and the remarkably consistent captures them at their very best. A million miles away from the hype and hubbub of Dublin, something special is stirring.