For most of us, a bad hangover doesn’t inspire much – aside from pangs of anxiety, pain and general nausea. When it came to writing Ailbhe Reddy’s new album, Endless Affair, however, bleary-eyed shifts at her former job in a music shop offered up no shortage of material.

“I was working at Musicmaker,” the singer-songwriter tells me, in a quiet corner of a Dublin pub. “I’d be suffering from a hangover at work, and I’d end up writing stuff on the back of old receipts.”

Those early scribbles ultimately grew into the songs on Endless Affair, which finds Ailbhe exploring the space between the youthful highs of reckless abandon, and the harsh necessity of moving on in life, and facing up to mortality and vulnerability. Three years and a few million streams on from the release of her Choice Prize-nominated debut, Personal History, the new album – her first since signing to the New York and London-based label MNRK –  demonstrates her captivating growth as a songwriter.

“It was just time to reflect, with the age I was getting to,” she says of hitting her early 30s. “I ended up finishing a lot of the songs during lockdown, so I was thinking about all that stuff a lot during that time.

“I remember watching Little Women, maybe halfway through lockdown,” she adds, “and being like, ‘I’d give anything to be going to a debutante ball right now…’ I was actually jealous of the social lives that they have in Little Women. That’s desperate!”

As such, most of Endless Affair takes place against the central backdrop of a party, and all the associated elation and mayhem that comes with it.

“I always think that’s like a sub-genre of songs, drinking songs, whether it’s the positive or the negative,” she reflects.  “‘Inhaling’ is about that feeling you get when you’re having a really good night out. You’re with your friends, and you’re like, ‘I don’t want this to end’. But then there’s other songs about the darker side, where you’re using it as a coping mechanism – or you’re feeling like you’re going a bit too far.”

Ailbhe Reddy. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Of course, for Ailbhe’s generation, attempts to grow up and move through the traditional stages of adulthood are further complicated by Ireland’s worsening housing crisis.

“David McWilliams did a podcast recently, talking about the reason why people in their late 20s and early-to-mid 30s are struggling mentally is because they’re not hitting those milestones – because they’re milestones that you can’t hit,” she states. “God forbid if you’re not in a relationship, you’re absolutely not getting a house, regardless of what your job is. And, if you’re a creative, it’s just not going to happen. It’s very easy to not bother trying to grow up, when you know you can’t do those things.

“It’s sad to see so many people – people my age, younger than me, and older than me – emigrating because there isn’t anything there,” she continues. “Michael D. Higgins said it last year: ‘It’s not a housing crisis, it’s a housing disaster’. And fair fucking play to him!”

She taps organically into both the concerns and the vernacular of her generation on Endless Affair, with her platitude-free approach to songwriting having become notably more intricate.

“I think I’ve gotten better at it,” she considers. “Personal History was maybe a bit more broad. I put a lot of thought into the lyrics on this album. Like on ‘Last To Leave’ – you know when you meet someone, and there’s something that you don’t like about them? And, if you have enough self-awareness, you’re like, ‘The things that I don’t like about them are the things that I don’t like about myself – and that’s why it’s grinding on my nerves’. It’s about watching that at a party.

“It was easy to make that detailed, because I was talking so much from personal experience of that,” she adds.

Was she always that self-aware?

“Hell no!” she laughs. “Five years ago I was very unevolved. There’s definitely been a lot of therapy and reading – and experience. I don’t even know how aware I was of that when I was writing it.  One of the best things about being a songwriter is that, when you release an album, you can look back at it and think, ‘This is like a little snapshot of a journal’. You can almost look at it with fresh eyes, because you’re not that person anymore. I can be like, ‘Oh, I can actually see this clearer now that my emotions aren’t all tied up in it’.”

Each new generation, she reckons, gets better at interrogating their emotions.

“10 years ago, if you said the word ‘boundaries’ to someone, they’d be like, ‘Are you talking about a farm wall? What the hell is that?’” she smiles. “That word just didn’t exist when I was growing up. Now, people say boundaries every five seconds. People also didn’t say the word ‘toxic’ back then – though I think maybe we now overuse that word!

“I read something the other day – how most people have grown up associating apologies with shame, and that’s the reason why people don’t like apologising. If you don’t think that apologies should be associated with shame, then it actually makes it so much easier to apologise. You’re just being like, ‘Sorry about that! Sorry I made you feel bad!’ And that’s so much easier than, ‘I lost!’”

Like many artists, Ailbhe turned to writing at a young age, as a way of making sense of her emotions.

“I always did it, but I don’t think I was conscious that’s what I was doing,” she recalls. “Have you ever seen that drawing that has ‘feelings’ all mixed up inside someone’s head – and then when you actually name the feelings, it separates them all out? That’s what songwriting is.

“The second last track on the album, ‘Pray For Me’, is about my grandmother dying – and I didn’t even realise I was upset about that,” she continues. “But I sat down one day, and it was one of those really nice experiences, where you just write the whole song in 15 minutes. And I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know I felt that way about that’. I obviously did, I just hadn’t named it yet.”

Ailbhe Reddy. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

She reunited with producer Tommy McLaughlin for Endless Affair – returning to Donegal, where she also recorded Personal History.

“Tommy’s one of the most unsung people in the Irish music industry,” she remarks. “He’s done Pillow Queens’ first and second records, loads of SOAK records, and Villagers’ records. That SOAK record last year [If I Never Know You Like This Again] is one of my favourite albums to come out of Ireland in the last 10 years. Tommy's part of the sound of so much of the fabric of the Irish music industry.

“But he’s super sarcastic,” she adds. “And he wouldn’t blow smoke up your arse, for anything. Him saying, ‘That was really good’, is worth 10,000 compliments from someone else. He’ll give you all the tools that he has to facilitate exactly what you need to do. He really listens, and he sees people. Now, I wouldn’t say that to his face or anything!”

The songs she soaked up while working at Musicmaker also provided plenty of inspiration when creating the new album.

“I was getting introduced to a load of music from the lads in there, because they were constantly showing each other new stuff,” she explains. “So I was listening to loads of Courtney Barnett, and loads of Julia Jacklin. And older stuff, like Steely Dan. Andy Shauf is a big influence as well – maybe not sonically on a lot of stuff, but his songwriting style is more casual or conversational, so I was digging into that a bit more.”

She’s also remained a staunch Avril Lavigne fan since childhood – marking the 20th anniversary of the Canadian artist’s debut album, Let Go, with a special tribute show at The Workman’s Club last year.

“I used to play ‘I’m With You’ in Musicmaker, which is obviously full of music people coming in and out,” she recalls. “But whether it’s a 16-year-old girl, or a 50-year-old man, they sing along with ‘I’m With You’! That song crosses boundaries. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful. I was obsessed with it when I was a kid.”

Some of the faces from that Avril Lavigne night have also made their way onto Endless Affair’s artwork – with Ruth Medjber’s cover photo serving as a dazzlingly chaotic celebration of the Irish music community, complete with mid-revelry shots of Maria Kelly, MayKay, SOAK, and Sinéad White, among many others.

Endless Affair album artwork | Artwork Ruth Medjber / Sarah Moloney

“We wanted it to look really loose, so we went method – we were like, ‘Keep drinking!’” Ailbhe says of the photo shoot. “I don’t deserve any Oscars for that performance, because I was pretty drunk. And we had to do it on a Tuesday night! I remember someone said to me, ‘Do you really want to do it in Workman’s? It’s so recognisable.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but that’s cool! I like that it’s recognisable!’ And it’s only recognisable to people who are from Dublin, or have lived in Dublin. So we’re all in on that joke together.

“It’s easy to talk shit about Dublin, with the prices and everything – but cutting your teeth in music in Dublin is such a great thing,” she reflects. “You’re immediately embraced. So it is a celebration of that.”

It’s been a steady upward trajectory for Ailbhe since she played her first open mic night back in 2013, in Mother Reilly’s in Rathmines – landing a gig on the back of that, and another on the back of that. As she points out, the music scene was a “totally different” set-up back then.

“The first time I got on radio was because some guy saw me playing in Sweeney’s, and he was like, ‘Come around, we’re doing this radio thing’,” she says. “And I ended up on Today FM. It was an exciting time, because things built up like that. There wasn’t really a concept of  Spotify at that point. It was just word of mouth, going around to different pubs. If you wanted to get out there, you actually had to be playing the gigs.

“I was working in an office, and I had done an Arts degree,” she adds. “I was giving music a year, and then I was going to go back and do a Masters, to be a teacher. But I didn’t do that. I decided to try music for a bit longer – and I’ve been trying for a bit longer ever since!”

Of course, last year brought plenty of milestone moments for Ailbhe, including relocating from her native Dublin to London, after signing to MNRK. She’s currently living with fellow Dublin artist Constance Keane, also known as Fears, of M(h)aol – and like many Irish emigrants, still finds herself pining for decent pints.

“You’ve no idea,” she laughs. “Whenever I come back, it’s the first thing I do – walk to the pub near my parents’ house and have a pint. And I know I sound like a stereotype, going to London and being like, ‘Shit London Guinness!’ But it is garbage. There is one pub near enough to me in Stoke Newington, called The Auld Shillelagh, and it’s the only place there that I’d drink a Guinness.”

Ailbhe tells me that she didn’t make the move solely for work – she was ready for a change of scenery.

“I’d loads of mates over there, so I wanted to give it a go,” she remarks. “There’s more stuff, and more choices over there. And if you’re gay, there’s more going on. I can have my Hinge set to one kilometre. In Dublin you’d need to have it at fucking 50km if you’re gay – like there’s only 20 lesbians in Dublin! And I’ve dated almost all of them!

“I still love Dublin whenever I come back,” she adds. “I had mates come over at the beginning of the year for a few days when I was still home, and we did every single possible thing: Guinness Storehouse, The Gravediggers, The Hole in the Wall, Johnnie Fox’s, big walks… It made me appreciate the city a lot more, seeing it through other people’s fresh eyes. And the pubs are better!”

She’ll make her highly anticipated return to Dublin later this year, with two nights in Whelan’s on May 5 and 6. The months leading up to that, however, are set to be monumentally busy ones, with a run of shows on both sides of the Atlantic.

"I’ll pretty much be on the go from the beginning of March until the Whelan’s shows,” she says. “But the Whelan’s shows are going to be so cute, because I’ll have done loads of stuff – and then that will be the last two nights. May 7 will be the worst hangover of my life. Maybe I’ll get a whole new album just out of that!”

• Endless Affair is out now, via MNRK UK. Ailbhe Reddy plays Whelan’s, Dublin on May 5 & 6.