LISA O’NEILL

All Of This Is Chance (Rough Trade)

After award-winning success with her previous album, 2018’s Heard A Long Gone Song, Ireland’s stand-out contemporary folk artist Lisa O’Neill returns with an evocative collection of modern folk classics. Uncompromising, unbound, and unmistakeable in its execution, All Of This Is Chance is an enchanting vehicle for the mind.

O’Neill’s inimitable approach to her craft cannot help but invoke a sense of wonderment within the listener. This is an album that deserves to be consumed and enjoyed by an open, undistracted mind: simultaneously a love letter to the past, and an artist taking the genre by the scruff of the neck and guiding it into an exciting future.

Various themes in Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 masterpiece The Great Hunger are beautifully used as inspiration throughout. But it is O’Neill’s take on her own existence – innocent yet wise – within the natural world that will draw the listener in, and have them returning.

words ELLIOT OAKLEY