Kate Nash announces new album Cailin, eleven years in the making and rooted in her Irish heritage

[Leo29]

Kate Nash will release her new album Cailin on January 22nd, an eleven year passion project that explores Ireland, Irishness, and the diaspora experience, drawing directly on her own dual Irish nationality through her mother, who was born in Dublin. All my earliest musical memories were in Ireland, Nash said, live music in the pub, going to Sharon Shannon gigs, seeing the best accordion player you've ever seen and it's a bored looking eight year old boy in a puffer jacket. There's a natural respect for musicians as it's embedded into the fabric of everyday life.

The album was recorded on the West Coast of Ireland at Studio Cuan under the guidance of pioneering trad musician Charlie Lennon, with production handled by KoOoLkOjAk, and will be released through Kill Rock Stars. Earlier this year Nash shared a powerful cover of Sinead O'Connor's Famine as part of the same broader project honouring her heritage, and that same track appears on the new album's tracklist alongside songs titled Cailin, Wild Atlantic Way, Irish Saints, and Pog Mo Thoin.

The new single Spilt Milk takes the album in a more directly political direction, honouring the Repeal the 8th movement and reaffirming a woman's right to make decisions about her own body. It's about not having control over your own body, not being listened to and feeling like the powers that be are getting bigger, scarier and more crushing, Nash explained. With the overturning of Roe v Wade and women's sexual health rights being rolled back in the US this song feels pertinent to today. The song questions why the female voice is so ignored and why we'd be expected to accept this.

Eleven years is a genuinely long gestation period for a single album, and the combination of deep personal heritage exploration alongside sharply contemporary political commentary suggests Cailin is shaping up as one of the more thematically ambitious records of Nash's career, moving well beyond the sound that first made her name back in the late 2000s

Kate Nash Announces New Album 'Cailín' | News | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviewswww.clashmusic.com

[Busquets]

Eleven years in the making is a genuinely long gestation period for a single record, and it makes you wonder just how much the album actually shifted and evolved across that entire stretch, especially given how much has changed politically around reproductive rights specifically in that same window of time. Curious whether Spilt Milk specifically was written recently in direct response to Roe v Wade being overturned, or whether it existed in some earlier form well before that

[Yeet28]

Working directly with a pioneering trad musician like Charlie Lennon rather than just sprinkling in some generic Irish sounding instrumentation from a distance suggests Nash is taking this whole heritage exploration project genuinely seriously rather than treating it as a surface level aesthetic choice.

That kind of direct mentorship from someone with real deep roots in the tradition tends to show up clearly in the final finished product

[Gunther29]

The Sinead O'Connor cover of Famine feels like a really fitting and meaningful connective thread running through this whole album's broader themes, especially given how fearlessly outspoken O'Connor herself was throughout her entire career on exactly the kinds of political and social issues Spilt Milk is now directly engaging with here. Nice continuity between two different generations of politically engaged Irish and Irish diaspora women songwriters

[Luke_67]

Pog Mo Thoin as an actual song title is a delightfully blunt bit of Irish language cheekiness that most casual English speaking listeners are going to need to look up, and honestly that is probably exactly the entire intended point behind choosing that specific title. Nash clearly is not softening or diluting any part of this whole project for a broader mainstream audience's comfort

[CyberRider56]

Recording specifically on the West Coast of Ireland rather than in a more conventional studio setting elsewhere feels like a genuinely deliberate choice meant to actually shape the record's overall sound and atmosphere, not merely its explicit lyrical themes and subject matter. Location can meaningfully influence a recording in ways that are honestly pretty hard to fully replicate or fake after the fact back in a completely different studio setting

[Wizard]

Pairing deeply personal heritage exploration with such sharply pointed contemporary political commentary within the very same record is an ambitious combination to pull off well without either half of the album ending up feeling tonally disconnected from the other. Genuinely curious how those two very different threads, family memory and reproductive rights activism, actually weave together once the whole record is finally out and can be heard as a complete, unified piece of work