“I have become an aerial view/Of a coastal town that you once knew.” Location, location. The songs on Fionn Regan’s award-winning debut The End Of History took shape on Bray Head and were saturated in seaside off-season melancholia. That rainy penny arcade maritime atmosphere permeated every groove of this collection of nuanced and impressionistic nu-folk (or anti-folk, or non-folk) tunes that eschewed narrative ballad formality for a fragmented stream of consciousness that was closer to the true skewed nature of Clarence Ashley or Mississippi John Hurt, or more latterly, the gnomic pronouncements of Will Oldham and Nick Drake. The End Of History evoked the sound of a seaside childhood recollected in, if not tranquillity, then solitude.

No 20 in 2009, as voted for by over 200 Irish musicians.