Lankum's latest album 'False Lankum' takes listeners on a chilling and unforgettable musical journey

The camera starts with an extreme closeup of Radie Peat’s face. She delivers the first line of ‘Go Dig My Grave’ a cappella. We can see her breath as she sings each word – the effect is chilling, both literally and in the way her spirit appears to be escaping as she sings ‘Go dig my grave, both wide and deep. Place a marble stone at my head and feet, and on my breast, a snow-white dove to tell this world that I died for love.’

A simple accompaniment tolls a death knell as the camera slowly pans backwards, showing Peat surrounded by mourners dressed in black, some with their faces covered, in a cold, stark room where the paint flecks from the walls. As the camera backs out of the room, a high drone strikes us to the core and the image changes to hands bound in rough twine, some fighting to free themselves, others twisting the knots tighter. The music builds and ghostly figures of the mourners flash in the dark. If you’re wearing good headphones, the maelstrom grips your innards, twisting them in that same twine until you’re left again in the room you started, this time alone with Peat, who breathes heavily and stares accusatorily at you until everything finally blinks out.

The video for ‘Go Dig My Grave’, the first single from Lankum’s latest album False Lankum, is extremely unsettling. And this is what Lankum (Peat, brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, and Cormac MacDiarmada) do best. Now on their fourth album, the Irish group have matured into this wholly unique and uncanny sound. The music is vaguely familiar, as much of it springs from traditional sources, but the melodies sound more like something remembered from a fever dream than something you’d catch at a pub session.

Even though the group are often referred to as one of the most exciting voices in Irish traditional music, they’re keen to separate themselves from the scene. “We know what the tradition is because we’ve been around so much and we know that what we’re doing is not traditional music,” Ian says. “It’s something where traditional music is a strong element to what we do, but there’s, you know, it’s only one element among many.”

With each of their previous albums – Cold Old Fire (2014, as Lynched), Between the Earth and Sky (2017) and The Livelong Day (2019) – listeners could hear that sound develop as it wrapped itself in drones and distortion and darken as it drifted further from its traditional core. False Lankum is the natural progression of that evolution.

The album is wonderfully dark. The cover features an etching of Dante’s deepest layer of hell by French artist Gustave Doré, and the press release uses language like ‘horror’ and ‘hell’ to describe tracks that include murder and Jonah ballads, and it calls their newly composed triptych of ‘Fugues’ ‘a chaos of sounds that seem to mirror time moving backwards.’ I wonder if this field trip to hell was intentional. “We had a lot of discussions beforehand where we said that the dark bits would be as dark as we could possibly get them,” Daragh explains, “but we also wanted to do a full-on contrast and have light parts as well. So, you’d have these really kind of horrific moments and then also some really sweet and almost heavenly kind of feelings.”

Perhaps the fact that they stayed in a Martello tower on the coast during the recording had something to do with the album’s mood. “It’s an exceptionally beautiful place,” Peat says. “It was very otherworldly to be in a Martello tower, which kind of just looks like a very nice dungeon in parts, you know.”

Whether the dungeon vibes seeped into the music or not, they admit that the location did have something do with the overall maritime theme. “To be by the sea every day while you’re thinking of all these concepts and ideas for the material, I think definitely that’s how the sea got in there in such a big way. We’re literally just seeing it every day,” Peat says. Daragh adds, “we just kind of realised at a certain point [during recording] that almost every single one of the songs referenced the sea in some way, but it definitely wasn’t the plan.”

The reference to the sea is blatant in places, as on the gentle sway of ‘Clear Away in the Morning’ – ‘Take me back on the bay, boys… I don’t want to go ashore, boys’ – or the more tempestuous ‘The New York Trader’. It’s a Jonah ballad, a specific folk song that centres on a ship crew’s discovery of a criminal aboard and the subsequent consequences, in this case involving a supernatural storm throwing them off the boat, and provides the album’s best advice in its closing lyric – ‘never go sailing with a murderer.’

Elsewhere the connection to the sea is more incidental and perhaps imaginary on the part of the listener, as on the reel ‘Master Crowley’s’. Led by three concertinas (including a bass concertina played by Cormac Begley), the main tune eventually drifts off as if we’re listening to a player aboard a boat that floats out of the harbour until we’re left with the sounds of the docks – metal clanging and deep bellows. I ask if this was the image they had in mind as they wrote the song. “We kind of talked about it when we were rehearsing, that it would turn into a satanic ritual, being headed by Aleister Crowley, just to play on the name,” Daragh says. “We were going to chant, like a horror movie soundtrack, [in a high-pitched voice] ‘Master Crowley, Master Crowley.’ But that never made it into the mix,” he laughs.

While they may have decided against chanting, they certainly experiment with the layers of sound throughout the album. The press release alludes to ‘weirder stuff’ in the mix, which I find out includes ruffled crisp packets and snapping rhubarb. They credit producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy with helping them realise the music they have in their heads. “He knows how to get whatever it is that we’re imagining when we’re playing these tunes,” Daragh says. “He’s actually able to make that physical reality.”

Spud’s influence can be increasingly heard on the last few albums, having produced one track on Between the Earth and Sky and half of The Livelong Day, and he’ll be an important part of the upcoming live shows too. “Spud comes with us and he’s almost like playing the sound desk as if it’s a piano or something. He’s a part of the band as well.”

While I have no doubt that the music will make for an excellent live spectacle, part of the beauty of False Lankum is that the songs bleed into one another, making it feel like one solid piece of art rather than an album of disparate tracks. This is an album as experience. “Play it loud,” Ian says. “Start to finish.” “On good speakers,” Peat adds. And prepare yourself for a Dantean sound journey.

This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today