Joshua Burnside: "I'm not hiding behind any metaphors or symbolism - I'm just going straight to the point"

I’m chatting with Joshua Burnside a couple of days after his performance at the RTÉ Choice Music Prize live show at Vicar Street, on a bill that included fellow nominees Amble, CMAT, Junior Brother, Just Mustard, pôt-pot and SPRINTS (Bricknasty and Maria Somerville couldn’t attend due to other commitments).

The evening captured the remarkable breadth of contemporary Irish music - from blistering post-punk to experimental electronics - with Burnside’s atmospheric folk quietly occupying its own corner.

Across a handful of carefully shaped records, Joshua has assembled one of the most distinctive catalogues in contemporary Irish music. Emerging from Belfast with his Northern Ireland Music Prize winning Ephrata, he revealed a sensibility rooted in folk tradition but open to interesting influences - field recordings and intricate studio textures.

His songs often move between the intimate and the expansive, weaving personal reflection with echoes of folklore and landscape.

“We had a good time,” Joshua confirms. “It was amazing to be there, it was just fun hanging out in the green room with all the different artists and having the craic with them.”

Joshua was nominated for the Choice for his critically acclaimed Teeth Of Time, a record that has also been nominated for the UK's Folk Album of the Year Award, a Northern Ireland Music Prize and an RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Award.

RTE Music Choice Awards at Vicar St on March 5, 2026. Copyright Jason Doherty/www.hotpress.com

“I didn't really expect that,” Joshua admits. “It came out and sort of built up a bit of momentum, people were listening to it and sharing it and all that craic. So it was a nice surprise, that almost a year on from the record’s release, all this sort of stuff started happening for it, which is great. I'm going over to Manchester in a couple of weeks to perform at the UK Folk Awards and hopefully win it, that'd be great”.

We’re sitting down to chat about Joshua’s new album, It’s Not Going To Be Okay, a record written and recorded in the wake of the death of his closest friend, Dean Jendoubi, of whom Joshua says, “He was an incredible person, and I miss him every day. He drifted unawares into the deepest sleep and died of a drug overdose on August 17th last year”.

Tell me more about Dean. What was he like?

“We grew up together in school and played in bands together,” Joshua relates. “He was one of the best people to be around. It was a devastating loss for all of us, all of his family and friends. He struggled with alcohol and drug abuse for years; some people can make it through that, come out the other side, and some people don't, and he was one of the ones that didn't.”

It’s visibly difficult for Joshua to talk about Dean. I feel for him, he’s written a powerful tribute to his old pal. All you need to do is listen to the opening two tracks ‘You And Me’ & ‘With You’ and the love between the two men is immediately obvious.

“I hope people can resonate with the record,” Joshua says. “And anyone that's lost a friend, can relate to it, and find some sort of catharsis in it. I'm not hiding behind any metaphors or symbolism - I'm just going straight to the point. That’s the way I wanted to deal with it.”

The title track, reminiscent in some ways of John Donne’s timeless Death Be Not Proud, is harrowing. But the album also conversely contains much euphoria, being a celebration of Dean’s life in songs such as the tangled shanty of ‘Nicer Part Of Town’, and the sweet, small hours rumination ‘Nighttime Person’.

“I feel,” Joshua elaborates, “the best way to deal with grief and pain is with music in a major key. I think I'm actually uplifting despite the words, similar to the way in which country music and Americana do that. A big part of my musical DNA is Hank Williams or George Jones. I don't want to listen to really sad songs that are also really sad melodically, I feel it's too much to digest.”

Skin Hunger is a fantastic EP on Dean Jendoubi’s Bandcamp and contains the song ‘Great Grooms’, on which Joshua features.

“We recorded that in his mom's greenhouse,” he smiles. “I love his music. Originally we were in a rock band. He played the drums and I played guitar, and another friend that I'm still very close with, Chris McGovern, played bass. We met up once a week in Dean's parents’ house, still in our school uniforms, and just rocked out together. It was the happiest days of my teenage years doing that.”

“Skin Hunger,” he continues, “was the last EP that Dean released, almost 10 years ago. When I listen to it now, I'm like, ‘Whoa. That's really weird, cool and modern sounding’. He sort of stopped making music, the more his addictions got worse. I would have always egged him on to make more music, but he just never got around to it again.”

It’s an EP that deserves exploring. The sparse yet immersive ‘Engine Oil’ is a particular highlight, as is closer ‘In Touch’, which offers an insight into Dean’s sonic experimentation. On 'Moon High’ off It’s Not Going To Be Okay, Joshua sings, “You were balancing on the tiles of the patio / Talking to yourself or the roses / I dunno / Saying I'll get better / Soon you'll see/You won't even know me". It’s a tune that maps his denial stage of grief in haunting detail, all wrapped in a stirring melody.

“I'm sort of saying,” Joshua explains, “that I don't give a fuck about you, about anything about our relationship; trying to deny that we were even friends because the pain of losing him was so hard that I just couldn't accept it, a sort of self-preservation mode. The verses of it are little snapshots of memories of us together and I guess guilt as well.

“We partied a lot together and the guilt is that I managed to sort of turn things around, and get out of that world, and he didn't, and it's hard to say why that is.”

‘Good Times Are Comin’ is a tipsy reverie told from the perspective of Dean, which Joshua feels is the darkest song on the record. He recorded it in an “almost ridiculous pantomime way with my studio partner Jamie Bishop. He's an amazing songwriter and helped me produce it. He played the bass, drums and organ, and all sorts of weird noises on it. It was a joyous experience recording it - making music and having fun - wholesome, which is the opposite of what the song is about. I guess it was kind of healing. I don't know if I could have recorded that song on my own.”

Elsewhere, ‘The Last Armchair’ is both a tender evocation of friendship and quiet celebration of Dean’s presence in the world. The song unfolds with the patience that characterises much of Joshua’s writing here - allowing memory and absence to sit side by side. Before releasing the track, Burnside sent it to Dean’s family, who gave their blessing - a gesture that lends the song an added gravity.

What emerges is less a lament than a gathering of fragments - moments shared, conversations remembered, the ordinary intimacy of friendship. One hopes the tribute offers some small solace, with traces of Dean woven gently through the record’s emotional fabric.

The album’s closing track, ‘Remake’, turns its gaze towards Dean’s funeral service, capturing the strange blend of grief, storytelling and communal warmth that follows loss. Here, Joshua sketches the atmosphere with restraint - voices, memories and quiet gestures accumulating until mourning gives way, briefly, to something like celebration, as he walks the old paths of his and Dean’s world.

In a lilting voice, he sings, “I thought of us then and a cool wind blowing through our hair… and I thought of something you said once/ Wandering around the woods off our heads / It’s all just a remake, nothing new / Maybe next time you’ll play me and I can play you.”

Thus closes a tribute of rare grace - one in which memory, friendship and music briefly converge, before receding once more into the quiet from which they came.

• It’s Not Going To Be Okay is out now. Joshua Burnside plays Cyprus Avenue, Cork on May 1 and Button Factory, Dublin (2).