Kiss Big, the latest album from Irish singer Ailbhe Reddy opens with an ending. “I see you,” she sings on “Align” as a melancholy synth percolates underneath her description of the reflection in a train window. You can imagine the goodbye play out as if it were filmed in black-and-white.
Reddy began writing Kiss Big several years ago, when the Dublin-raised artist moved to London, where she’s currently based, and was going through a breakup. “There were bits and pieces that I wrote over the years,” she says on a recent video call. The components gradually came together in the form of an album that digs into the aftermath of a relationship and all the conflicting emotions that come with it. Lyrically, Reddy glides back and forth through time as she juxtaposes flashback’s with revelations that sound more recent than they are. Making an album takes time.
“They’re like I can’t believe you went through that recent breakup,” says Reddy of responses to the album. “I’m like, no, it was five years ago or something. It takes so long between the experience, the writing the recording, the releasing that by the time it’s coming out, it’s old news.”
Musically, the album’s mix of rock and electronic elements converge on the standout “Graceful Swimmer.” It’s a song that took a number of different tries to perfect. “I started writing it as a real indie rock song,” says Reddy. Then it morphed into a piano piece. In the studio, though, analog synth elements and drum loops came into play to give it a similar feel to other songs in the Kiss Big batch.
The lyrics for “Graceful Swimmer” had been floating around for a bit. “I wanted this almost list version of things that you notice about a person when you’re together that you idealize when you’re apart,” says Reddy. However, the chorus, which first came to Reddy while singing in the shower, was a challenge that persisted until the first week of recording at Attica Audio in Donegal, Ireland, with input from trusted collaborators. “I kept trying to resolve it too much,” Reddy says of the chorus for “Graceful Swimmer.” Then SOAK, who provided backing vocals for Kiss Big, had a suggestion: “Why don’t you just let the chorus hang?”
Reddy’s co-producer, Tommy McLaughlin, had some advice too. “Tommy said I was really trying to push the vocal in the chorus to lift it,” Reddy recalls, “and he said why don’t you sing it more lazy, softer. Like why don’t you sing the whole thing really lazy and soft and it was those two things unlocked it.”
“Graceful Swimmer” has become one Reddy’s favorites on the album as well. “It’s amazing that, in this kind of collaborative space, this song that you’ve been sitting on for years, maybe, can just be slightly tweaked and it becomes this new thing,” she says. “It felt like it was stuck in this zone and, with these two suggestions, it just opened up and became something really special.”
Emerging from the Irish music scene, Reddy released her first EP in 2016. Her debut album, Personal Histories, came out in 2020 and was nominated for Ireland’s Choice Music Prize. Since then, she’s played festivals like Glastonbury and South by Southwest. Reddy has thoughts on why Irish musicians have been getting more international attention in recent years. “I think that when a band from a small country gets really big, you kind of go, I could do that too,” she says. For Reddy, that artist was likely Hozier, whose single “Take Me to Church” became a global hit in the mid ‘10s. “He was the only one I saw exploding out of the small, Irish scene, but that was over a decade ago,” says Reddy.
Since then there have been others, notably Fontaines D.C. “The band that does it, like Fontaines- who are brilliant and very nice guys- they do it and the infrastructure that they leave behind is better for everybody else,” says Reddy. “They leave a ladder behind that people can climb.”
Reddy returns to Ireland often and remains friends with artists from the local music scene, like SOAK and Pillow Queens. “We always help each other out, even if it’s just down to borrowing gear or whatever,” she says. “It feels like because everybody is from this very small country that people have each other’s backs.”
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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