Child Of Prague: "Honestly, there was no masterplan... Before we knew it there were serendipitously six people jammed onto a tiny stage"

Moody rock ‘n’ rollers are great but I also like ones who have shit-eating grins on their faces, so gleeful are they to be up on stage performing.

Falling into the latter category are Child Of Prague, the shapeshifting Dublin six-piece who will soon be gracing the pages of Hot Press’ Hot For 2026 special issue.

I say ‘shapeshifting’ because over the course of forty glorious minutes, they run the full gamut from folk, indie and math rock to jazz, punk and grunge.

They weren’t born when it came out, but it reminds me of The Frames’ equally genre-bending Fitzcarraldo album.

With three of their members sharing vocal duties and fiddle and sax both prominent in the mix, the only band Child Of Prague really sound like, though, is themselves.

That was my glowing, Amstel-assisted review of Child Of Prague as they packed out one of the bigger venues at January’s Eurosonic showcase festival in northern Holland where Irish acts generally did themselves – and us – proud.

“Groningen’s such a cool city,” vocalist and violinist Amelia Durac enthuses. “We understood the importance of the gig but were a bit taken aback when we arrived at the venue and discovered that it was actually a school dining hall. Which had sinks alongside one side of the room and a bar that had been built in the corner.

“It didn’t look too promising but the amount of people there and the reaction we got exceeded our expectations.”

Afterwards, Amelia and her five bandmates hotfooted it up to the Nieuwe Kerk where their pals Madra Salach were doing their rowdy folk thing.

“We’d met them fleetingly before and then we did a Paddy’s Day gig together, which as you can imagine was fairly lively!” sax-player and second violinist Rachel Baum laughs. “We were also both at Live In Leeds in November and flew back on the same flight. When we landed in Dublin and walked into the terminal building, Madra Salach were all on one side of the corridor and we were all on the other side. Their bassist Jack said, ‘It looks like we’re going to do a dance battle!’”

“We definitely would have beaten them but didn’t want to be showing off in public,” singer and guitarist Adam Tracey insists.

It was whilst both studying at Trinity College that Adam, a Thurles native and Jack McDonnell, a San Franciscan exile, started chatting and discovered their shared penchant for Midwestern emo (as in the Midwest of America, not counties Clare, Limerick and Tipperary).

At first it was meant to purely be a writing project but one by one Amelia, Rachel, bassist Noah ‘Fry’ Edwards and drummer Miranda Gallacher came on board and Child Of Prague was born.

“Honestly, there was no masterplan,” Adam confirms. “It started out as just the two of us and before we knew it there were serendipitously six people jammed onto a tiny stage.

“In addition to emo, Jack and I bonded over Irish traditional music which we started exploring at roughly the same time.”

“We do a version of ‘Cooley’s Reel’ and, if you go through Instagram, there’s a post of Jack playing it on guitar when he was 13 or 14,” Amelia takes over. “He’s Californian but knows loads of sean-nós songs that we’d never heard before and pronounces Irish words really well, even though he doesn’t know what most of them mean. At an informal session the other day in Kerry, he suddenly  started singing ‘Oro Sé Do Bheatha ’Bhaile’ to the room and everybody loved it.

“I grew up listening to a lot of Sharon Shannon and Clannad, but being classically trained didn’t really play any trad until some friends of mine started running a Tuesday night session at university. I felt really out of place at first because it’s a totally different approach to classical, but then I became immersed in it.”

“I was classically-trained too and it wasn’t until I learned saxophone and started improvising that I got into trad,” Rachel says. “It’s a much freer way to play, the crux of it being that you have to have a really good musical ear. That wouldn’t be the most integral part of classical because you’re reading music precisely. Trad is similar to jazz in that a lot of it is improvised. It’s a skill that you can take into pretty much all genres of music.”

As a classically-trained musician, is there the expectation that you can make a living from it?

“I keep up lessons and am part of the TU Dublin Conservatoire so I know a lot of classical musicians who rely on something called Musical Chairs, which emails you when there’s spots available in orchestras that you can audition for,” Rachel reveals. “It happens roughly once a month and you have to travel to somewhere like Slovenia at really short notice. You might get €16,000 for the year. No way are you getting rich off of it but it’s a gig.”

What, as a rock band, does success look like?

“I guess it’s being able to do music full-time, which has become increasingly difficult,” Amelia proffers. “Touring is very expensive, especially when there’s six of you and you’re booking extra seats for your instruments. If we got to the stage where we could dedicate ourselves to the band fully, no side hustles, that’d be success.”

The industry buzz that Child Of Prague had been generatimg by themselves intensified last year when they signed a heavyweight management deal.

“The most important moment for us was meeting Helena Watmuff from Candy Artists at Ireland Music Week in 2024,” Adam enthuses. “She’s based in Leeds and manages five bands and two producers, one of the latter being Sergio Maschetzko who produced Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road who are a big band for all of us. Thanks to the likes of CMAT, Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap, it’s a good time to be Irish at the moment in the UK, both from a fan and a media perspective.”

I’ve been writing about Irish music for over forty years – seems longer, says you – and hand on heart have never known artists to be so supportive of each other.

“When we started, you’d play a gig with another band and then they’d be at your next show as fans,” Rachel enthuses. “We were immediately accepted into the scene and given opportunities that we thought might take years to get.”

Talking of gigs, what were the first ones they went to?

“There were two in one week,” Amelia recalls getting in first. “I saw Lana Del Rey in Malahide Castle – I cried my eyes out throughout the whole thing – followed by Tame Impala in 3Arena, which was a nice introduction to the live side of things.”

“My first ever gig was The Kooks in the 3Olympia,” says Adam. “The one that made me see lots of things in life differently, though, was IDLES in the Iveagh Gardens. After that first mosh there was no turning back!”

“Florence + The Machine followed by Villagers,” Rachel reveals. “I was about fourteen and they were both very formative.”

Child Of Prague’s first recordings were very much of the lo-fi variety.

“It’s amazing what you can get away with in a bedroom – musically!” Adam laughs. “Myself and Jack used to live together in a house off Meath Street, so were always doing demos.”

More recently the band have teamed up with Faction Records, the Dublin label which has also released music by the likes of Ispíní na hÉireann, Mick Flannery, Sorcha Richardson and James Vincent McMorrow.

“One of the guys who runs it, Ken Allen, was also at Ireland Music Week while we were still independent of our manager,” Amelia says. “The way he talked about music and wanting to help new artists hone their craft was really inspiring. The Clothed In The Sun EP we did with them is so beautiful. Hooking up with Ken was perfect timing for us.”

Did they get teary-eyed when they got their hands on the vinyl for the first time?

“We got sent test pressings, but there’s only five of them so there’s been a long, protracted custody battle,” Adam concludes with a smile. “But, yeah, taking it out of the sleeve for the first time was every emotional. The physicality of vinyl records still really matters.”
Amen to that!

• Clothed In The Sun is out now on Faction Records. They play Fuinneamh 2026 in Co. Louth (September 12 & 13), and support Gurriers at Dublin's 3Olympia on November 1.