Ivor Novello Rising nominated, Athens-based Dublin artist lullahush (AKA Daniel McIntyre) returns with details of his new album Ithaca – out 11th April via Future Classic (SOPHIE, Chet Faker, Flume). Following on from his 2024 EP An Todchai?, the new album sees lullahush exploring the discourse between tradition and innovation, as he explores how a holistic marriage of traditional Irish music and contemporary electronica can express a unique perspective on modern Irish identity.

The LP Ithaca continues this experimental ethos while weaving a narrative interrogating ideas of pride, home and belonging. Longing for home in exile has been widespread amongst the Irish diaspora over the years. This includes 19th-century famine refugees, 20th-century exiles fleeing the Catholic Church’s oppression, those who left during the economic depression of the 1980s, and more recently, those affected by Ireland’s housing crisis and Dublin’s embrace of Big Tech. Daniel explores all of this as well as his own odyssey with him now living in Europe as a result of his homeland becoming “economically uninhabitable.”

“I miss it, but I have a difficult relationship with it” says McIntyre. “‘Ithaca’ is where Odyssus is trying to get back to in the Odyssey – my search for a sense of home since leaving has made me think about what Ithaca means. Maybe it’s not a place, maybe it’s a series of circumstances, maybe it’s something internal, maybe it’s something you carry around with you.”

The first taste of the album arrives in the form of ‘Maggie na bhFlaitheas’ (Maggie of the Heavens), which morphs the reel (a genre of social Celtic folk dance) ‘Over The Moore To Maggie’ into the album’s statement piece.

“I am very excited by the power that sampling offers a bedroom producer like me to build multi-layer narratives and self-referential worlds,” says McIntyre. This is expanded upon across the first half of the record, which opens to the cry of a curlew before leading into Sean-nós singer Saileog Ní Cheannabháin’s ethereal rendition of ‘An Droighneán Donn’ (The Blackthorn Bush). Elsewhere, Maija Sofia’s voice drifts through ‘Jimmy An Chladaigh’ (Jimmy of the Shore) while the album concludes with ‘Raglan Road’, built around a WhatsApp voice note of the artist’s 97-year-old great uncle Jack singing the Patrick Kavanagh poem.“I am trying to find ways of bringing risk and chaos to the show, to make something fragile and intimate that lives and breathes in front of an audience,” continues McIntyre. “My collaborators and I have been working with tapes, feedback, contact mics, live sampling and a haphazard pile of synths, pedals and whatever is lying around in order to articulate live the sentiment of what those processes created.”