8/10

There are records that treat sorrow as a private wound, and others that recognise how grief can spread outward, entering families, communities and even the stories a country tells about itself. And on his second studio album 'Solip', Irish singer-songwriter Kilkelly moves between those scales with considerable control, drawing personal bereavement into a wider examination of guilt, alienation and the uneasy emotional inheritance of modern Ireland.

The album follows 'The Prick & The Petal', but it doesn't simply repeat the folk-centred language of his debut offering. His return to Ireland after time spent within Berlin’s music community appears to have sharpened both his sense of place and his willingness to unsettle familiar traditions. Folk remains the foundation, yet the arrangements frequently push beyond conventional acoustic songwriting into stranger, more theatrical territory.

Tracks like ‘Hanging Tree’ approach bereavement with particular directness. Its falsetto vocal and sparse, spectral arrangement give the song the quality of a lament heard from some uncertain distance. The performance never becomes demonstrative; its force comes from the sense that the narrator is struggling to maintain contact with those who are no longer present.

While on ‘Fell In Front Of Trouble’, he turns towards a more theatrical form of darkness. The song’s examination of ingrained shame carries traces of cabaret, folk horror and black humour, creating an atmosphere in which confession and performance become difficult to separate. Its unease is not simply personal as it appears to ask how guilt is taught, reinforced and passed down until it begins to feel like instinct.

At times, 'Solip' asks a great deal of us. Its density, bleakness and refusal of clean resolution can make it an uncomfortable record. Yet that discomfort is closely connected to its purpose. Here, Kilkelly isn't interested in making grief attractive or reducing psychological distress to mere atmosphere.

What emerges instead is an album willing to remain with difficult emotions after their most obvious dramatic moment has passed. It considers what loss leaves behind, how guilt disguises itself as duty and how people continue searching for connection while increasingly enclosed within their own perception.

'Solip' offers no reliable route out of that isolation. Its achievement lies in giving it form: through weathered voices, strange instruments and stories that refuse to look away.