Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

Small Talk, the debut album from Dublin’s Soda Blonde, was one of last year’s standout Irish releases; a record that paid homage to the group’s collective experience through their twenties, with songs that had spent several years waiting to make it to the studio. All told, the LP took almost half a decade to make and, a year on from its launch, the alt-pop four-piece are experiencing the full physicality of its content in the form of the live audiences as their world returns to more normal times.

Soda Blonde kick off their winter Irish tour in Galway’s Róisín Dubh on Friday week, November 25. It follows a busy year of writing and performing, but this series of gigs perhaps best represents the kind of live music artists missed so desperately during the pandemic.

There is a familiarity to the venues and hopefully to the faces that fill them – ending up in Vicar St on December 9, the schedule has the sense of a homecoming.

“We’ve been playing the Róisín Dubh, the four of us, for over a decade,” frontwoman Faye O’Rourke explains.

“It just kind of feels like a second home really. I’ve loads of family there myself so I’m very familiar with it.

“Galway and Cork are probably the top two. There’s definitely that thirst for a good time there… There was an abundance of festivals on [this year] with all the arts grants which was kind of nuts. There was so much on which was great – it went from nothing to a hundred really fast. I think there’s still a little bit of getting back into the swing of performing again but that’s what makes the whole thing worthwhile really.

“Releasing a record during Covid… It was lovely to get some critical acclaim but that’s kind of a short-lived high. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but without people experiencing it with you, it’s not really the same.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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