Ríoghnach Connolly and Stuart McCallum are the creative heart of The Breath. And for them, it’s all about the song.
Connolly writes the only way she knows how; a stream of poetic consciousness giving rise to honest, personal, heartfelt songs as likely to touch on childhood summers and first love as cultural dislocation, post-colonial injustices and grief. But it’s her deeply soulful, utterly engaging, stop-you-in-your-tracks voice – whether delicate and hushed or powerful and gutsy – coupled with Stuart’s understated brilliance and their exquisitely crafted songs, that give The Breath such emotional depth.
‘Land Of My Other’, the third album by The Breath, is a place of memories and melodies, lyricism and lore. A place of sunlight, faerie-tales and rowan trees; of grief, incarceration and thunder in darkness. A place where ancestral trauma and colonial injustice meet blazing pride, romantic self-rule and hands held in a circle in the sea.
Released on Real World Records, October 2023