One of Ireland’s most popular singer-songwriters, Fionn Regan, will be at the city’s Town Hall Theatre next Wednesday, February 19, as part of a nationwide tour to promote his new album, O Avalanche.

The Wicklow-born folk singer released his debut album, The End of History in 2006 and it went on to be nominated for a Mercury award.  Since then, he has continued to innovate, having had an electro-pop adventure in 2009 with The Shadow of an Empire and following that in 2011 with an acoustic release, 100 Acres of Sycamore.

Dogwood Blossom, which featured on that album won him new fans as it featured in Shane Meadows’s 2010 TV series This Is England ’86, and 2020’s Normal People, which became a hit during lockdown. Meanwhile, actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for Fionn’s 2017’s The Meeting Of The Waters.

The songwriter’s work has been sampled by Bon Iver and he has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards; he’s been photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and was made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society.

O Avalanche, his seventh album, was co-produced with legendary producer Ian Grimble, a collaboration that brought Fionn’s feel for climate and landscape in a new creative direction.

“It’s like you’re looking into this world where there’s a depth of field, it’s summer, and you’re floating into and out of it,” he says of the album. “The songs can come together in the moment, so it’s not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there’s an eternal optimism about it – a kind of upward-feeling energy.”

His first since 2019’s Cala, O Avalanche is also an album that is, in the singer’s words, “very much on a level”.

As Fionn explains, “I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you’re thinking about it in a visual way, there’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour”.

He wrote enough material for two or three albums before finding the songs that “started to hang out together and fought their way to becoming the album”, he says.

Fionn wrote much of the material on the Spanish island of Mallorca, a place he describes as his “true north”.

For him, it’s somewhere “where you step back a little from the main drag of bigger cities. You’re sat there in the mountains, looking towards the cities, rather than the other way. There’s a kind of focus, a feeling that you’re tuned in to something”.

No wonder then, he feels the new album has “got a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it”.

Next Wednesday night’s show starts at 8pm. Tickets at €22.50/17.50 are available from tht.ie, 091-569777 or at the theatre box office.

Pictured: Fionn Regan: Wrote the songs for this album in Mallorca.