From a scrappy group of can-swilling mid-20s musicians, playing rowdy trad sessions in Limerick's innermost haunts and drunk-tanks, to an arena-filling live band, Hermitage Green have come a long way since they started in 2010.

The band's latest release — and their first in over two years — 'Younger Days' sees them delve ever-closer to ambient/electronic territory; with soaring vocal harmonies laid over a resonant sea of arpeggiated keys, humming Moogs and rhythmic vocal loops making up the track's deeply atmospheric soundscape.

It's a brilliantly unexpected and sharp creative left turn for the band — a disarmingly ruminative, melancholy-tinged cut, steeped in synth-driven textures and abstract snatches of the introspective.

Oh — and it also features a spoken-word passage from Australian author, former-heroin addict and convicted bank robber, Gregory David Roberts.

Suffice to say it's unlike anything we’ve heard from the Limerick quintet before...

After a wry nod to the jointly woebegone weather in those dreary Irish twins, Dublin, and the band's hometown of Limerick, I began chatting to frontman Dan Murphy about Hermitage Green's new track 'Younger Days' — which released today.

"Its all been really enjoyable," Dan says of the in-studio recording process for the new track.  "We've been a band for 13 years since 2010, we've released a couple of records and we've written a lot of songs, but we've always enjoyed keeping the creative process moving," Dan continues, "its always got to be different, and that's the only way we keep ourselves entertained — reaching for something we haven't done yet..."

Hermitage Green at Live at St. Luke's. December 2021. Copyright Celeste Burdon.

The cumulative toil of eighteen months of hard, in-studio graft, 'Younger Days' is the first in a suite of new tracks that Hermitage Green have been cooking up behind the scenes. Our mission statement for these new releases," Murphy explains, "was very much to engage in a different way of writing songs; less conventional arrangements, different instrumentation — to try writing and collaborating in different ways.”

The new release also sees the band adopting a more impressionistic and lyrically sparse writing style, taking inspiration from the conventions of electronic music — placing an emphasis on brief lyrical lines and ditching the traditionally stifling verse/chorus structure.

“A lot of the lyrics I wrote from the last record, I would describe as pretty direct,” Dan explains. “they’re unambiguous and I enjoyed writing like that at that time, but we wanted to do something different – to see how we could tap into an emotion in a more abstract sense.”

"It's a metamorphosis that's been happening slowly over the last four or five years," says Dan, "we’ve got a Moog, a bass synthesizer, and then Griff, our guitarist, has two synths that he works off, we use a lot of arpeggiators, and the lads use electronic drumkits.”

It's a new and exciting sonic direction for the band, signifying a welcome development in an already rich and evocative sound. “It’s been something we’ve been evolving into for the last few years,” states frontman and lead-vocalist Dan Murphy. “We started out traditionally as a much more folky band, but its always felt natural for us to keep things moving.”

“If you’re static for too long, creatively you can just tend to repeat yourself – we didn't want to write another ‘Quicksand,’ we wanted to write stuff that we’ve never written before.”

Studying literature in the early '80s, the track's feature, Gregory David Roberts, lost custody of his daughter, resulting in his downward spiral into drug addiction — robbing petrol stations and banks in order to fund his habit.

“When imprisoned in Melbourne, he managed to escape from a maximum-security prison in broad daylight – I don’t know quite how you do that, but he’s a very resourceful, intelligent man!" Dan quips.

“He fled across Asia and ended up in India, where he worked in Mumbai for the Bombay mafia for about ten years, until he was finally rearrested and served the remainder of his sentence.”

During this period of incarceration, Roberts started writing his literary debut, Shantaram. A novel loosely based upon the action-packed events of Gregory's life, Shantaram follows the exploits of Lindsay, a convicted Australian bank robber and heroin addict, who flees to India after escaping from Pentridge prison, immersing himself in the shady criminality of the Mumbai mafia.

"I went to India when I was in my early 20s,” Dan wincingly reminisces, “to do a bit of soul-searching – or whatever they call it, and I was in a beach in Goa when I picked up a copy of a book called Shantaram." The novel quickly became a 2003 bestseller, lauded for its evocative and philosophical portrait of Bombay life — evidently making a indelible mark on the psyche of a then 20-something Murphy.

"I read it, and it quickly became one of my favourite books ever," Dan explains, "it was the perfect accompaniment to my little soul-searching journey in India, and it left a lasting impression on me.”

"It’s a very deep, introspective, philosophical book about exile, addiction, life and death."

15 years or so down the line, Dan reached out to Roberts, asking him if he would like to make an appearance on his podcast The Chat. "We really enjoyed speaking about creativity and writing, and I hadn’t realised he is quite a passionate music maker," Dan remarks. "By the end of the call we had loosely agreed to work on a song together.”

Armed only with broad sketches for the track, Dan eventually ventured out to Jamaica, to meet with Roberts, and fully flesh out the lyrics of 'Younger Days.'

Dan Murphy of Hermitage Green at David Gregory Roberts's home in Jamaica.

"Greg has had a really interesting life, and he brought such a rich perspective to the track," Murphy says. “We put our heads together – I told him what my lyrics were about, and he came back with this amazing insight – a more direct interpretation of my lyrics — and the rest is history, as they say…”

'Younger Days' also sees Hermitage Green writing to subjects that the band have never tackled before; namely Ireland's burgeoning mental health crisis, and the lack of societal interconnectedness — in a time where technology allows us to be more connected than ever. It's a weary yearning for a bygone era and better times passed.

“I remember talking to Greg about Angela’s Ashes,” Dan begins, “and its always struck me as frightening that Frank McCourt could paint this picture of Limerick in 1950’s Ireland, where it was pretty much third world; people were starving and dying of consumption, but they weren’t throwing themselves in the river — they still had a will to live.”

“So, what the fuck have we lost in modern society, that we can’t go on living – that we’d rather die?”

“That was how Greg’s spoken-word piece came about, Dan explains. “We were reflecting on those things we’ve lost touch with, looking back on younger days to reconnect with that sense of meaning, or that connection we once had with each other...”

Dan Murphy of Hermitage Green

Dan has also been kept busy hosting his podcast The Chat, interviewing a wide array of personalities, from the music industry and beyond – Blindboy Boatclub, Nicola Tallant, Ryan Tubridy, Jimmy Carr – and most recently, Skunk Anansie guitarist Martin Kent.

“It’s been such an amazing little passion project,” Dan muses, “I could have never imagined that it would take me the places it has when I started it five years ago.

“It was a license to sit people down who I find interesting and ask them about the things they do. To get the privilege to sit with someone like Jimmy Carr and ask him how his creative mind works, it's just fascinating — I feel really lucky," Murphy reflects.

“The opportunities and exchanges that come as a result of a simple conversation with a stranger online, they’re beautiful and I’m very grateful to have been afforded that by the podcast.”

On the heels of 'Younger Days,' the lads of Hermitage Green have certainly been keeping busy, with a wealth of new music up their sleeves and a new album on the horizon. “We’re hoping to have most of it recorded by next Christmas," says Dan, "with a release for next Spring – hopefully May.”

Hermitage Green's next hotly awaited single, set for release in the coming months, promises to be a similarly eclectic affair; " it has some textures and sounds, stuff like vocoder— that we’ve never used before."

"It feels really fresh and interesting — I think listeners will be pleasantly surprised when they hear that stuff compared to what we’ve put out in the past..."

Hermitage Green are set to perform a string of dates up and down the country this December, with two homecoming performances in Limerick and one in Killarney — tickets available via Ticketmaster.