Fionn Regan shares new single 'Headphones'

Following first single 'Islands', Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan today announces his new album O Avalanche due out 1st November via Nettwerk Music Group and available to preorder here.

To accompany the announcement Regan has shared new single 'Headphones', a near-hymnal beauty on which his beatific vocals reference fleeting moments half-remembered over mellifluous ripples of glinting guitar.

“I float sometimes when you’re around,” sings Regan on “Islands”, setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Mallorca, O Avalanche is an album of levitating intimacies, abstract and intuitive yet infused with a tangible sense of the elevating ties between environment and emotion.

Between its sun-dappled backdrops and lambent arrangements, the result is a set of sublime songs and something more: it’s a record to float with, immersive, uplifting and transporting. Check out the visualiser to 'Headphones' below.

His first since 2019’s beautiful Cala, it’s also an album that is, in Regan’s words, “very much on a level” – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Regan explains, “I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you’re thinking about it in a visual way, there’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour.”

Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty 'Dogwood Blossom' drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86.

Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s 'The Meeting Of The Waters' while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. “I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,” says Regan.

Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. “It’s like you’re looking into this world where there’s a depth of field, it’s summer, and you’re floating into and out of it,” he says of the album. “The songs can come together in the moment, so it’s not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there’s an eternal optimism about it – a kind of upward-feeling energy.”