Following first single “Islands”, Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan today announces his new album O Avalanche due out 1st November via Nettwerk and available to preorder here. To accompany the announcement Regan has shared new single “Headphones”, a near-hymnal beauty on which his beatific vocals reference fleeting moments half-remembered over mellifluous ripples of glinting guitar. Watch the visualiser HERE.

“I float sometimes when you’re around,” sings Regan on “Islands”, setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Mallorca, O Avalanche is an album of levitating intimacies, abstract and intuitive yet infused with a tangible sense of the elevating ties between environment and emotion. Between its sun-dappled backdrops and lambent arrangements, the result is a set of sublime songs and something more: it’s a record to float with, immersive, uplifting and transporting.

His first since 2019’s beautiful Cala, it’s also an album that is, in Regan’s words, “very much on a level” – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Regan 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.”

Rippling like the sea, “Islands” sets that magic-hour mood, using images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. That flow leads to Valencia for the luminous “Teix Mountain”, which evokes the off-piste mountain spirit of its title and the album as a whole. Its rarefied sense of romanticism also extends to the title track, where Regan’s long-standing friend Anna Friel provides beautifully delivered vocals for an almost hallucinatory hymn to companionship. Braided with haunting references to storms and “summer ghosts”, it’s a song lit with inner faith, breaking out in the declaration, “I believe there’s a light that brings good souls together.”

Good souls duly unite beneath a stormy and star-lit sky in the gorgeous reverie of “Blood Is Thicker Than Wine”, a song bursting with impressionistic detail. “That song has an instant visual thing about it to me,” says Regan, a description borne out by lyrics of such evocative power, you can picture the scene immediately: two lovers under the moon, laughing and lit by lightning.

From here, O Avalanche moves from a sense of loved-up drift to a state of serene, unforced resolve. “Written in a dream,” says Regan, “Farewell” is a tenderly up-tempo take on partings, sorrowed yet beautifully becalmed in its looping arrangement. “Into the Light of the Sun” has a feeling of resolution about it, unfurling “like a burst of energy,” says Regan, while album closer “Deià Song/Llucalcari” resembles a soft, supple awakening from a dream of summer, eyes wide open in readiness for new horizons.

“I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it,” says Regan. It took him two or three albums’ worth of material to find the songs that felt simpatico – the ones that “started to hang out together and fought their way to becoming the album”. Capturing the mood, Regan wrote the record while staying in Mallorca, a place he describes as his “true north”: “There’s a sense of an artistic energy there, 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.”

Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty “Dogwood Blossom” drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s “The Meeting Of The Waters” while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. “I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,” says Regan.

Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. “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.” With the gentlest of touches, O Avalanche will sweep you off your feet.

“Before The Avalanche Tour”:

Saturday 9th November - Galway, Ireland - The Black Gate *(SOLD-OUT)*
Thursday 14th November - Kilkenny, Ireland - Cleere's Bar & Theatre *(SOLD-OUT)*
Friday 15th November - Dublin, Ireland - Unitarian Church *(SOLD-OUT)*
Saturday 16th November - Waterford, Ireland - Phil Grimes Pub *(SOLD-OUT)*
Friday 22nd November - Ballydehob, Ireland - Levis Corner House *(SOLD-OUT)*
Saturday 23rd November - Leap, Ireland – Connolly’s *(SOLD-OUT)*
Friday 29th November - London, UK - St Pancras Old Church *(SOLD-OUT)*

O Avalanche album artwork and tracklist:

Fionn Regan announces new album "O Avalanche" released 1st November via Nettwerk || Shares new single "Headphones"

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