Radie Peat opens her debut without a single concession to ease: just her voice, low and stark, breath audible, singing a variant of Hares on the Mountain to the arrangement Shirley Collins built for the 1964 album Folk Roots, New Routes. The Fender Rhodes enters quietly. Then Mellotron, then Wurlitzer — layers added not to decorate but to deepen, the way sediment forms. That first track is a statement of intent so precise it barely needs the rest of the album to make its argument. The album didn't begin as a thematic project. Peat writes in the liner notes that she only noticed, after narrowing her choices by personal taste and capability, that she had gathered songs of female struggle, suffering, strength, and endurance. That accidental coherence is one of the album's most interesting qualities: the theme arrives as discovered truth rather than curatorial agenda, which means the songs bear it without feeling curated into submission. The arrangements are where producer John 'Spud' Murphy earns his credit. He works in granular detail — the sucking of air through concertina bellows on Cailín Deas, the disruptive thwack of Eleanor Myler's drums — treating the physical mechanics of the instruments as musical events in themselves. The reverb on Willow Garden, performed by Lankum in major key in 2017, turns what was a communal sound into a haunting elegy. Peat's delivery of 'poor little girl' doesn't perform sadness; it buckles under it. Still I Love Him is the album's most frightening moment. A woman savagely beaten by her husband remains emotionally bound to him — a song found by fellow contemporary Irish singer John Francis Flynn — and Peat sings it without editorial distance, summoning what the review rightly calls 'oceans of yearning.' It's an uncomfortable song handled with total honesty. The discomfort isn't softened. That refusal is the album's defining quality. Liam Weldon's Dark Horse on the Wind, a 1966 lament for the lost dream of the Irish republic written on the brink of the Troubles, arrives late in the running order with Peat singing against a solid drone: 'Now the warriors spring from the earth / To maim and kill their own.' The connection between the women's endurance songs and this political elegy is unstated but structural — both are about being trapped inside forces larger than individual will, loving things that have failed or brutalized you. The album ends feeling inevitable in the best way, the kind of inevitability only apparent after it's done.
