The best music of the month & All Together Now with Mags The Frog Report

A live recording from The Big Romance about a 2008 Sub Pop-released classic album of the 2000s. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Step into a world of misty melodies and cavernous echoes with Seattle band Fleet Foxes’ landmark debut – a defining record of the late-2000s indie folk revival. Led by Robin Pecknold, the album blends the lush, pastoral harmonies of the 1960s with a haunting baroque-pop sensibility and lyrical themes rooted in nature, tradition, and introspection. Like the Bruegel painting on its cover, every track reveals a dense, beautiful world that evokes a timeless – almost mythic Americana sound. This podcast episode is a live recording from our listening party in The Big Romance in April, with guest journalist and Fleet Foxes fan Aoife Barry. Our next Listening Party is Smashing Pumpkins later this month and it's sold out. Listen Closely: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (2008) A Nialler9 listening party, hosted by Niall Byrne with guest Aoife Barry. Before the album Niall: Hello everyone, how are you? Welcome to the Listen Closely album listening party. I'm Niall, and this is Aoife Barry. Aoife: Hello. Niall: We're here tonight because Aoife picked this album, as she has before. You picked Jeff Buckley last year. Aoife: Yeah, and we ended up doing three of them. Niall: We did, we went to Cork. We did two here and then we went to Cork to talk about Jeff Buckley. And you were at the My Bloody Valentine listening party last year as well, back in October. Aoife: It must have been October, yeah. Niall: Well, obviously we're here for a very different album tonight: Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes, from 2008. As you heard there, we played a bit of the Sun Giant EP by the band, which came out a few months before this album, because we want to give the album its full due. They're a little different, and we'll talk about that. But yeah, you picked the record. Aoife: I did. I obviously must like it. And it's such an incredible record. Is there anybody here who hasn't heard it? That's really exciting, if so. I'm excited for you to hear it. You got a sneak peek there of what the vibe is going to be. I picked it because I love this record, but I also had a funny story about how I first heard them. Back in 2008, when this record came out, I'd read about this band called Fleet Foxes in a music magazine. I don't even think I'd heard a song yet, this is back in the day. And I was on holidays in Berlin, and in the tiny little hostel we were staying in, they had a sign up on the wall: "Who's playing tonight? Fleet Foxes, Café Zapata." I said to my boyfriend, "I think that's a band I read about in the magazine, will we go see them?" And he was like, "Grand." So we went, and they were unbelievable. It was so good. Beach House were supporting them. So it was 2008 smacking you in the face. Niall: Come on. Aoife: And I took photos, which I found. I have photos. Artifacts. One is terrible, the other one's not so terrible, taken on one of those little Canon digital cameras. And I still have the ticket, I kept the ticket, I'm one of those hoarders who keeps all their gig tickets. But it was so good: the venue they played in had a dragon that breathed fire out every fifteen minutes. Niall: So they'd be playing and this dragon… Aoife: I'm not even exaggerating. Fire would just shoot out of this mechanical dragon. It was so Berlin. And Fleet Foxes were so stunning, and Beach House were so stunning. I love Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, I love all those harmony vibes, I wish I was born in the seventies, sadly I was not. So I fell in love with them immediately, and I've been a big fan ever since. Although I'll say I probably dipped a little bit around the Crack-Up era, their third album, but then I saw them when Shore came out, their most recent album, and fell right back in love with them. Niall: We're going to talk about all the albums that come afterwards, but we'll

Fees, touts and a monopoly: the state of Irish gig ticketing in 2026.

Today’s podcast guest For Those I Love has just been announced for The Circle by Jameson Music stage at this weekend’s All Together Now Festival. While I’ve written extensively about Dave Balfe’s For Those I Love project, right up to last year’s second album Carving The Stone,  it’s been seven years since we chatted on the podcast. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink   You may remember the original 2019 podcast -  which was the first time that Dave talked deeply and intensely about the loss of his friend Paul Curran, a catalyst for making a devastatingly emotional album about love, loss, grief and friendship. On his return to the podcast this time around, the topics are a less weighty but no less interesting - a year after album two - Balfe can't stop building props, remixing his own work and creating films for the upcoming live shows at All Together Now, and he reveals he has been working on two distinct ATN live sets, and they couldn't be more different from each other. The Friday show at Some Kind Of Wonderful leans on the props Balfe has spent the last few weeks building himself, including a giant grass mound housing a surprise constructed by hand in his back garden. The Saturday show at The Circle by Jameson Music stage is something else entirely: a full club reworking of Carving the Stone, 60 minutes of fresh material remixing the album into a dancefloor club set, that allowed Balfe to acknowledge another strand of his musical talent.  In between we talk about the evolution of his live visuals, and the importance of nostalgia and album listening in a digital age. The Circle by Jameson Music has consistently offered one of the most varied lineups at the festival in a secluded setting in the trees on the grounds of Curraghmore and its fifth year is no different. Along with FTIL, you can catch sets from last week’s podcast guest SOAK, the rapper Mike, Miss Dynamite, One Leg One Eye, Delivery Service, Pebbledash, Rory Sweeney (live), Jamz Supernova, Or:la, Mango, Ahmed With Love and the Mabfield Live Podcast among others. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community   

On this week’s episode my guest is SOAK. Bridie Monds-Watson has been making music since they were a teenager in Derry, releasing their Mercury-nominated debut Before We Forgot How to Dream in 2015 at just 18, followed by Grim Town in 2019 and If I Never Know You Like This Again in 2022, all on Rough Trade.

A live recording of a discussion about one of the best albums of 2025 from Rosalía. Rosalía’s Lux is the kind of album that demands to be heard properly and intently – a mountain-moving, orchestral operatic masterwork recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, sung in 13 different languages, and inspired from the writings of Simone Weil, Clarice Lispector and the lives of female saints, so that's what we did in March when we hosted two listening parties in Dublin's The Big Romance and Fidelity, as part of the Nialler9 Listen Closely album listening events. After the flamenco pop of El Mal Querer and the genre-slicing Motomami, on Lux, Rosalía made something else entirely – intimate and enormous, ancient and futuristic, deeply human in every sense. The album is so ambitious and creative – it felt right to dedicate some real time to the record in a suitable environment without distractions. So this podcast episode is a recording from night two in The Big Romance between myself Niall and guest Louise Bruton - who recently directed the short film Let Go - discussing the massive scope of Rosalía's Lux - the literary writing and saint-inspired spiritually romantic and rapturous album - which was my favourite of 2025. Lux realises an album of earth-shaking movements in four parts through orchestral spirituals, with The London Symphony Orchestra. Listen back to the chat in this episode. Our next Listening Party is Chemical Brothers – Dig Your Own Hole [1997] on July 29th.