The Mary Wallopers are not a nostalgia act. They are from Dundalk, they are angry about landlords and borders and the clergy, and they want you to be on your feet. Paddywhackery, their third album and the reason for their biggest tour yet, is the document of a band that has decided the criticisms — too Irish, too rough, too much — are a brief to double down rather than sand off the edges. Opening on Seán na Sagart, a new track built around a 1700s story of a priest-hunting hitman, the band sets its terms immediately. The melody skips, the room bounces, and Charles Hendy delivers the punchline about clergy and Brits with the timing of a comedian who knows the room is already his. Crowd surfing during folk music is a category violation the Wallopers have decided is simply the correct response. The new material runs hard at politics and capitalism without becoming a pamphlet. The Big Mixer has the room bouncing on cutting lyrics about greasing the machinery of capitalism, fast enough that the anger reads as exhilaration. Kit Kat Club sounds, per the review, like a hangover before the night is even over — Catriona Gribben's accordion wheezing through sour harmonies in a way that is far more interesting than any clean folk production. But they know when to pull the temperature down. Andrew Hendy's deadpan on the border — 'Someone put a border in Ireland. It's a pain in the hole' — lands before a sparse, droning version of Smuggling the Tin that holds the room in silence against Finnian O'Connor's uilleann pipes. Landlord's Demise is a slow march that somehow draws clapping and stamping from a crowd that was crowd-surfing ten minutes prior. This is the harder trick: a band that can hold silence as well as chaos is a band with genuine authority over a room. Closing on Frost Is All Over, a jig approximately 300 years old, they bring in strobes and hands-in-the-air energy without irony. That's the Wallopers' actual thesis: that folk tradition is not a museum piece requiring reverent handling but a living form that can absorb strobes, political fury, and pint-spilling if you trust it enough. Whether tradition likes it or not is, as the Guardian reviewer notes, not their problem.
