This is trad music, but not as your grandparents knew it. The sounds of fiddler Martin Hayes and his band of soul brothers The Gloaming may be direct descendants of the sounds that filled the smoky pubs up and down the country generations ago and caused stout-soaked floorboards to buckle under the force of enthusiastic foot-stomping, but it’s images of the calm green hills and still lakes of an Irish countryside rather than hazy midnight lock-ins that fuel this record.

Having said that, we are not in the realm of kitsch sentimentalism. With song-titles like The Necklace of Wrens, The Old Bush and Hunting the Squirrel The Gloaming are clearly unabashed romantics, but whatever negative connotations that term has acquired over the years would be erroneously applied here. Deep emotions are evoked in the playing, and they are conjured slowly and patiently, so gradually that you feel the pay-off isn’t inevitable, that they could play the song forty times and the inspiration may not hit and that they wouldn’t force it if that was the case.

Hayes personifies this style of playing on Sailor’s Bonnet, in which he plays fiddle alongside the guitar and piano of his American band-mates (Dennis Cahill and Thomas Bartlett, respectively). The track’s opening two minutes are soft and melodic but they feel like they are searching for that brief moment of epiphany. Softly dragging the bow across his strings so that it sounds more like the wind than a musical note, it’s as if he’s trying to hear whatever is living in his fiddle, trying to be heard just below the surface of the sound that note is making. Whatever spirit he has been trying to tease out eventually sweeps in like some sort of mythical bird, allowing you to bask in its glory for only a brief minute before it flies off again.

With Iarla Ó Lionaird the band has its foot firmly in sean-nós territory. The Irish language lyrics of Saoirse are adapted from Sean Ó Riordain’s poem of the same name and the singer’s desire to go down amongst the people has romantic precedents in Shelley’s Alastor or Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens. Bartlett’s piano has very little trad influence evident, and his playing on the album typically acts as a modern counterpoint to the playing of Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. While at times this takes the music to unusually dark places, it shows how the band is linked by their respective abilities to emote musically rather than by the strict forms of the styles they play in.

The inner peace the album expresses makes it so that by the time the seventeen-minute epic Opening Set comes around you’re ready to just sit back and enjoy it. Opening with Ó Lionaird taking the lead while Bartlett taps away behind him the song opens up to the sound of Ó Raghallaigh’s fiddle before the voice and piano return. A change in tone turns the track into a powerful example of Transatlantic showcasing and exchange, the traditional styles of the west of Ireland merging with the minimalist sounds of New York and Chicago. It’s a powerful centre-piece to a beautiful album that despite the traditional influences of its creators, feels as appropriately modern as any Irish album this year.