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Irish quartet Landless, featuring Lily Power, Méabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch recently announced their new album ‘Lúireach’, due for release on 7th June 2024 on Glitterbeat and produced by John ‘Spud’ Murphy, known for his inspired work with artists such as Lankum and ØXN. The announcement of their long-awaited follow-up to their 2018 debut, Bleaching Bones, was accompanied by the single and video for The Fisherman’s Wife, directed by Ruth Clinton & Cormac MacDiarmada (Lankum).
Starring band member Méabh Meir, and Directed by Ruth Clinton, the band have today shared their new video for the supernatural folksong “Death and the Lady”.
The song was adapted from the singing of Norma Waterson who believed, whilst the earliest writings of the song were in the seventeenth century, that the singing of it dates back to the time of the Black Death plague in the fourteenth century. A young woman encounters Death while she’s out walking and realises that her time has come. She begs Death to spare her life, offering him riches in return for a few more days on earth. He refuses and she is ‘snatched away’ after all, her dying breath heard in the song’s final few seconds of fading pipe organ.
The video is a personal meditation on the strangeness of death. Inspired by absurd theatre and German expressionist film, a conversation unfolds between a young woman and Death. Both characters are played by Méabh, alluding to the proximity between this world and the otherworld, and the thin veil in between.
As previously mentioned, a shift from their debut finds them adding instrumentation across the album, including pump organ, shruti box, trombone on one track and Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada on fiddle, viola and banjo throughout.
Landless – ‘Lúireach’
New album out 7 June 2024 on Glitterbeat
Formats: LP/ CD/ Digital streaming & downloads
Catalogue numbers: GBCD/LP 157
Pre-order on Bandcamp: https://landless.bandcamp.com/album/l-ireach
DSPs: https://idol-io.ffm.to/luireach
Track-listing:
1. Newry Highwayman
2. Blackwaterside
3. Lúireach Bhríde
4. The Fisherman’s Wife
5. The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry
6. Death and the Lady
7. The Hag
8. My Lagan Love
9. The Wounded Hussar
10. Ej Husári
