Seated around a table in a Dublin pub, the four members of Lankum are explaining what singer and multi-instrumentalist Ian Lynch calls the “mental strain” of performing their brand of folk music live. Part of the problem, he says, is the sheer number of instruments involved. “We’ve got about 30, across everybody in the band,” he says. “I play hurdy-gurdy, pipes, whistles, synths. Then there is the tape machine, a tambourine and concertina. That’s seven just for me. Honestly, our soundchecks take about four hours.”
There is also the fact that Lankum like to experiment with the fabric of the acoustic instruments they play: taping tin whistles together and blowing them simultaneously, recording not the notes produced by the uilleann pipes but the groaning of their bellows, taking drums to pieces to “get different textures out of them”. The results are such that, as Lankum happily admit, they sometimes listen to tracks from their most recent album, False Lankum, and haven’t got a clue what’s going on. “Like on The New York Trader,” says Lynch’s brother, Daragh. He says there is a sound somewhere between a jaw harp and a didgeridoo. “And I’m sure nobody is playing either of those instruments.”
“You know that bit on Master Crowley’s, where there’s a waspy type of sound?” nods Cormac Mac Diarmada. “I have no idea what that is. No idea.”
Perhaps understandably, a band with 30 instruments, who aren’t always certain who played what, have some very specific challenges to overcome on stage, a state of affairs compounded by their career trajectory, which has taken them from traditional music sessions in Dublin pubs to the kind of rock venues where experimental folk seldom shows its face. These days they are accompanied on tour by their “fifth member”, producer John “Spud” Murphy, but they have countless stories about baffled live sound engineers in the past who clearly had never seen their instruments before, or couldn’t fathom a band that seemed to have four lead vocalists, all wanting their vocals at the same volume. “It’s not a lead vocal and harmonies underneath,” says Radie Peat. “It’s a four-part harmony. They were trying to apply normal band rules to what was a total anomaly.”
A total anomaly sounds about right: there really isn’t another band around who are remotely like Lankum. They are immersed in Ireland’s folk tradition, and have travelled around the country collecting previously unrecorded folk songs for their repertoire. They talk excitedly about everything from different bowing techniques for the fiddle to the cross-pollination between old-time US music and Irish folk. And Ian hosts a monthly podcast, Fire Draw Near, each episode devoted to investigating a piece of traditional music in depth.
Yet Lankum sound about as far removed from most people’s idea of traditional Irish folk as it is possible to get. In their dense sound, you can hear echoes of Swans’ relentless intensity, of Sunn O)))’s crushing drone rock (Lankum are perhaps the only folk band in recent memory to have been interviewed for an extreme metal blog) and of the experimental electronica of Tim Hecker. “Lankum is like an audio arts project,” says Peat. “And then we are also individuals who engage in traditional music in a very traditional way, going to pubs to play a session. There is no finished product. We’re not on a mission to change things. We’re not going, ‘Right, it’s time to shake things up a bit.’ Under the umbrella of Lankum, that’s where we make a different thing.”
“Even somebody singing a song to a guitar is departing from the tradition,” adds Ian. “Traditional singing is just solo, unaccompanied singing. So even if you’re singing over an accordion, you’re already after veering off. I think as soon as you have made that decision, it’s all up for grabs. You can decide if you want to get a power tool and sing along to a power tool. It’s exactly the same as singing to a guitar, 100 per cent.”
Lankum’s musical roots stretch from childhood immersion in traditional Irish music (Peat and Mac Diarmada) to the Lynch brothers’ punk rock background, which included Ian performing in a band called, winningly, Fuck You Written in Shit. “When I was growing up,” he says, “my problem was that traditional music was the complete opposite of what I was into. It’s like state-sponsored music – everyone involved in it is conservative, nationalist, backward-looking. It’s white, it’s rightwing. I hate all that, I’m an anarchist, why would I engage with that?
“But when I found out what it was about, in my early 20s, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not it at all.’ Maybe there are different factions who have kind of got in there, but that doesn’t mean they own it, or that other people can’t engage with it. Even if those people are into it, I think, ‘Fuck, you can’t let them have it. No, that’s not yours, it’s ours. It’s culture and you don’t know about culture, so fuck you!’”
The band met at the aforementioned pub singing sessions and bonded through a desire to make what they refer to as “the sound in our heads”. Peat shrugs. “I don’t know how to describe it using words,” she says. “That’s why you make an album, to say something you can’t say with words. The only way we could describe this world we are trying to imagine, to anybody, is to actually make the music. That’s how we communicate it.”
They all agree that False Lankum, their fourth album, is as close to the sound in their heads as they have ever got. That it is the first folk album to be nominated for the Mercury prize in 11 years doubtless tells you something about the gradual narrowing of said award’s horizons, but also says a lot about how undeniable the music on it is. It was recorded in a Martello tower by the sea in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey, and photos of the tower online look weirdly like a metaphor for the sound of False Lankum: a vast, intimidating black monolith – “Built for a war,” as Peat notes – in the middle of a magnificent bucolic landscape. The album recasts traditional songs in an epic, dense, enveloping and impossibly powerful sound-world, linked by passages of free improvisation. Every song seems to operate at a level of emotional intensity that is just shy of unbearable. Listening to it is a pretty overwhelming experience.
“That’s what it was like to make it as well,” says Ian. “It’s extreme,” agrees Mac Diarmada, describing a way of working that involves having “no idea how a song is going to end up sounding” and experimenting “for fucking hours” until they come up with a suitable musical setting. “You’ll hammer away at something forever and it’s going nowhere, then all of a sudden, there are a couple of notes which make everything click together. It’s gone from the doldrums to elation. The energy is immediately palpable, and you just have to grab it, because it can get away.”
It is perhaps worth noting that, with its sonic ebb and flow and moments of melancholy beauty, False Lankum actually represents one of the band’s lighter offerings. The scourging opener Go Dig My Grave is followed by the drowsily lovely Clear Away in the Morning. The gorgeous Lord Abore and Mary Flynn, a Child ballad, shares space with Master Crowley’s, on which they succeed in the remarkable feat of making a traditional Irish jig sound profoundly unsettling. The album’s predecessor, The Livelong Day, was so unremittingly bleak and post-apocalyptic that Peat says some people thought it eerily presaged Covid: “A few people said to me, ‘It was like you knew about the pandemic before it happened.’ I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.”
In fact, she says, perhaps the pandemic influenced the sound of False Lankum. “During the pandemic I wanted escapism. I often spent a whole day listening to Enya because I could not deal with the world. And I think that led to the lighter parts of False Lankum. You need all of it – you need the darkness, you need the light. You just recognise the need for relief and light and hope and escapism. You need the full human experience. The light in Lord Abore and Mary Flynn is meant to be romantic and sweet.”
Mac Diarmada frowns at this description of a song that ends with both its 14-year-old protagonists dying horribly. “It’s absolutely tragic!”
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet, you know what I mean,” shrugs Peat. “But it’s got a sparkle.”
“In some way,” says Ian, “it’s also staying true to the tradition, where all facets of human life are explored and described. Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, when you get into Irish music, it’s really dark isn’t it?’ It’s not at all. Or it is sometimes dark but it’s also sometimes light, sometimes playful, sometimes funny, sometimes serious. All aspects of human life are there to be discovered in it.”
Understandably, given their exploratory working practices, the band say they have no idea what they are going to do next, although Peat has a thought. “We would definitely like to do a film soundtrack. I feel as if all our albums are soundtracks to films that don’t exist and I think we’d like to put our music to an actual film.”
That’s a really interesting idea. What kind of film? “Realistically,” she laughs, “probably a horror.”
• False Lankum is out now on Rough Trade Records. The Mercury prize winner is announced on 7 September.
