Ellie O'Neill: "It’s amazing to carry something through from your childhood, and for it to still occupy the same place in your life"

Ellie O’Neill is, by her own admission, “a fan of doing things slowly.”

“It's good to resist that urge to be super productive all the time, even though it gets harder and harder,” the Co. Meath singer-songwriter elaborates. “I often find that music, or just some kind of meaning, comes when you’re able to slow down, and not push things – when you bring a lightness to your work, and to the act of writing. Or when you just sit with yourself.”

This idea of embracing periods of rest, recovery and non-productivity is reflected in the title of Ellie’s long-awaited debut album, Time of Fallow – as well as in the unhurried road to the release.

While she’s gained serious momentum in recent years – following an Irish tour with Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief, major festival appearances, and a spot on our ‘Hot for 2026’ list – Ellie has been a notable presence on the Irish scene for the guts of a decade. The first time she appeared on Hot Press’s radar was back in 2017, when we reported on a charity gig she played in Anseo, alongside the likes of Maija Sofia, Paddy Hanna, and an acoustic Fontaines D.C.

“It's definitely a funny kind of coincidence – that it was a long process, and the title is that,” she says. “I’ve been playing the songs for a while, so they’re not necessarily new to me, or to other people who have heard them live. It's amazing that they'll get a release that is more permanent – and not just that transient thing, of playing the songs live.

“It took me a while to finish it, and find the right people to mix and master it,” she says of Time of Fallow, which was recorded during the pandemic. “But I didn’t feel like I was in a big rush to do it. I think it’s the perfect moment for it to be out. I wanted to do it in my own way – and this is it.”

Concepts of time and chronology also shift in unique ways within the album. Through her English studies, and particularly her thesis on Djuna Barnes' 1936 novel Nightwood, Ellie delved into the idea of ‘queer temporality’, as something beyond a traditional, linear understanding of time and existence.

“I was always reading,” she reflects. “That was a huge gift my mom gave me – bringing me home loads of books from the library, or bringing me to the library and letting me just sit and read. It was just a very normalised thing for me.

“And that was the lens that I wanted to look at the world through, when I was deciding what I wanted to study,” she adds. “It’s still a huge love of mine.”

Outside of music and literature, Gaelic football has also been a massive part of Ellie’s life – having played for Meath in her younger years.

“I’m still playing football, but I’m not playing at the same level that I was at one point,” she tells me. “The demands of that lifestyle are very impressive – especially for women's GAA, where nobody gets paid, and you're devoting your life to this like full-time thing. So I definitely had to make a choice at one point, and I decided to just give myself over to writing music – which was something I was doing anyway.

“They do seem like disparate worlds, but I think they're the same in so many ways,” she continues. “They’re both like forms of somatic meditation, and forms of presence as well. I think the best football players are extremely intelligent, creative people who can create their own way of doing something that is already established. There are so many overlaps. I feel almost the same when I'm doing both things.”

Credit: Sam Khoury

Growing up surrounded by brothers, music was always a personal outlet for Ellie.

“And it’s still that way,” she reckons. “It’s amazing to carry something through from your childhood, and for it to still occupy the same sort of place in your life, in many ways. Even if it has these other dimensions now – at the heart of it, it's still the same thing.”

The raw intimacy captured on the album has already been compared to the solo work of Adrianne Lenker, who Ellie opened for across a string of dates in 2024. Time of Fallow was also mixed by Philip Weinrobe – who worked closely with Lenker on the acclaimed 2020 albums Songs and Instrumentals, as well as 2024’s Bright Future. 

“Even to see three Adrianne Lenker gigs, one night after another, was very cool,” Ellie recalls. “It’s also great to see that people are willing to come out and listen to a songwriter that's presenting their work in that form – just voice and guitar – because that is some of my favourite ways to hear music.”

Adrianne Lenker at Vicar Street, Dublin, 21 April 2024. Copyright Bailey Shropshire/hotpress.com

2024 also saw Ellie open for another legendary force in the Big Thief universe, Tucker Zimmerman, as part of Pitchfork London. The 84-year-old American singer-songwriter – who collaborated with the band on Dance Of Love for 4AD – died in a house fire, alongside his wife Marie-Claire, in January.

Ellie remembers the London show as being "quite an overwhelming night for everyone – because it was the night of the US election, and as soon as the gig was over, they dropped a screen down in the bar, and played coverage of that."

"So we were all trying to get the hell out of there, because that was obviously the first night that we knew that Trump was going to get back in," she resumes. "But I did get to chat to Tucker for a minute or two. It was so cool to see his gig live – and so sad what happened this year to him. He's another amazing artist, and a true, lifelong creative person."

As a solo artist and collaborator – who has also shared stages with Irish acts like Dove Ellis and John Francis Flynn – Ellie has seen firsthand how the homegrown independent music community has continued to develop, and push boundaries, over the years.

“There's so many people making amazing music,” she reflects. “A lot of them are not engaging in the commercial side of it, and a lot of them are. And I think that doesn't necessarily create a divide between us at home, which is nice. And it's great to be able to go to so many brilliant gigs at home so often.

“The new Nashpaints album [Everyone Good is Called Molly] is really good,” she adds. “My friend Cormac Ó Driscoll is a great songwriter also. There’s loads of people who are not necessarily songwriters, but very hardworking, interesting musicians as well.”

Ellie has made no effort to dull down the edges of her own Irish identity for broader international appeal – with lyrics referencing Skibbereen, Auburn Street in Phibsborough, “Cailleach and Clothrú”, and the “curve of the Samhain moon”.

“I feel like Irish artists have always done that – especially the good ones,” she notes. “If you're writing from a true place, you're not filtering that for the sake of commercial gain, or for the sake of an end product. I always think about the amount of times that Sinéad is referencing parts of home that are just immediately Irish."

But, as she points out, "Ireland is obviously a cultural moment – and that can be a good and a bad thing for an Irish person writing music."

"Because it can just be picked up as fodder in that machine," she elaborates. "But you have to just do it. You have to just write whatever you need to write, and hope that it means something for you, and hope that it means something for somebody else as a secondary bonus.

“It's my way of understanding myself, and my life, and the people around me as well. So not using that would be a disservice – and an untruth, probably.”

Although Time of Fallow has yet to be released at the time of our conversation, Ellie is already looking forward to having “a bit of silence again” in her head, to carve out a path towards her next project.

“I just want to keep writing songs, and keep growing. I really feel like I'm still so new to it, in terms of the length of my career, the length of my understanding of the craft of writing songs – and, hopefully, the length of my life.

“But the funny thing for me is that once the song is written, it's already out – I've had that moment with it," she says of the release. "So in a way, this moment is for other people.”

Time of Fallow is out now. Ellie O’Neill plays the Bello Bar in Dublin on April 10.