Madra Salach have announced their debut album ‘Gorta’, and dropped the looming new single ‘Ribbon Factory’. Check it out below.
The record is the first full album from the rising Dublin six-piece, following the release of their debut EP ‘It’s A Hell Of An Age’. It is set for release on January 15 via Island Records, and you can visit here to pre-order.
Produced by Loren Humphrey (Westside Cowboy, Cameron Winter) in New York, ‘Gorta’ takes its title from the Irish word for “hunger” and sees the band continue to pay homage to Irish traditional music, but also push their sound into more experimental, darker territories.
Like the title suggests, the record will explore the types of hunger we all face – including the urge to revisit what we left behind, and the inheritance we carry from the generations before us.
“I usually write from personal experience,” said frontman Paul Banks. “I try not to go too big-picture. I can tap into the emotions that way.”
“The ideas of longing and yearning, all the kinds of hunger, they slot into where we are as 21st century Irish people,” he added. “The more I’ve thought and written about Irishness, the more I’ve seen how strange a history and a position and a culture we have.”
The cover is created by Oscar Torrans and captures a Blemmyes – a mythical headless being from medieval lore, whose faces are situated on their chests.
As well as announcing the new record, Madra Salach have also released the new single ‘Ribbon Factory’ as the first taste of the LP, which takes on gothic themes and the heavy atmosphere set to be continued throughout the album.
“We wrote this one in early 2025, and have been gigging it ever since,” the band shared. “It’s a song that totally influenced where we’re going as a band and we can’t overstate how rewarding it feels to finally share a studio version of it with you.”
Earlier this year, the Dublin band caught up with NME while at The Great Escape festival, and spoke about how they have seen more and more fans after hitting the live circuit.
“The fact that it’s having this much commercial success is blowing my mind, because my hopes for this project were to find our own little pocket in the niche folk revival so we could play small rooms in Dublin,” Banks said.
“We haven’t had a chance to really cement a new body of work yet, but the new songs we’re writing are such live songs that are so structured around a performance with energy,” he added.
They were also named as one of NME’s top 10 shows from The Great Escape 2026 – praised as delivering “an impassioned, snarling take on traditional Irish folk” and carrying out a “communal emotional exorcism in musical form”.
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