Nicole Maguire’s Nashville-recorded 2014 debut, What You Really Mean, featured a heavyweight team of session players, not to mention Crowded House producer Mitchell Froom at the console. It confirmed the young Cork native as a precocious talent with an
engagingly expressive voice and keen songwriting chops.

The follow-up, recorded here at home with Gavin Glass at the helm, and featuring some of Ireland’s finest musicians, is an even stronger effort. Her writing and performing style encompasses a tasteful blend of country-pop and classic singer-songwriter fare with a distinctly Irish flavour, continuing in a tradition started long ago by the likes of Mary Black, Maura O’Connell and others.

It starts out in a subdued manner with the slow-burning ‘That’s When You Know’, an airy,
atmospheric ballad with guitar and keyboards backdropping a soaring vocal melody with a hypnotic chorus. With drums pounding low in the mix and denser textures, ‘Any Minute Now’ is almost Beatleesque in the ambitiousness of the arrangement, while acoustic guitars and a light rhythm underpin the title-track, which skilfully utilises Paul Brady’s
vocal talents. Meanwhile, the gently lilting ‘Set In Stone’ finds Maguire sounding more vulnerable, on a song that showcases a maturity well beyond her years. In contrast, ‘The Good Kind’ is an upbeat country-rock tune in a Mary Chapin Carpenter or Rosanne Cash vein, Maguire sounding completely athome in the genre. An RTÉ Radio One album of the
week: no question.

Key Track: 'Hummingbird'

Out Now

8/10