Junior Brother: "You escape into something and that can drive you into a state of mind which is kind of hard to come out of"

The End has arrived for the musician they call Junior Brother. Relax your cacks. Real name Ronan Kealy isn’t hanging up his guitar.

The End is the title of his latest album. It’s his third, and another gem from the idiosyncratic folk artist, whose music really isn’t like anything you’ve ever heard before. His path to this distinct style wasn’t straightforward. As a teenager, Kealy played the keyboard in cover bands, earning money while secretly writing on guitar.

His eureka moment came when he played Damien Dempsey’s They Don’t Teach This Shit In School. The coarse accent and confrontational lyrics, layered over acoustic guitar, created a feeling of confused wonder that Kealy has been trying to recreate since.

“As a 12-year-old from County Kerry I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” he laughs. “The only time I heard that accent was going up to Dublin for the All Ireland when I was younger. I associated it with the big scary city.

“Then I heard the same accent coming through my speakers. I was afraid, confused and exhilarated. Ever since that moment, I wanted to replicate that. The ideal is for someone to listen to that and maybe get a tenth of that feeling – that moment changed my life. It made me sing in my own accent.”

From there, Kealy spiralled into Planxty, Nick Drake and John Martyn, as well as harpists like Derek Bell and Joanna Newsom. He also learned to stamp a tambourine under his foot to ground his ethereal fingerpicking.

These influences result in mind-bending folk guitar, atonal harmonies and a talent for vivid storytelling, as exhibited on acclaimed LPs Pull The Right Rope and The Great Irish Famine. On The End, the landscapes, folklore and rhythms of rural Kerry collide with the chaos of modern Ireland.

“The music, I feel, pushes my style to the limit,” he says. “So it felt like calling it The End reflected that. I was thinking of the end as something that doesn’t have to have a negative connotation. The end of something can be the start of something.”

That’s hinted at in the closer ‘New Road’. The title isn’t just a metaphor though.

“It’s about a motorway in Kerry that we were told was going to go through the house,” Kealy recalls. “The writing process made me fall in love with the landscape I’m from. Because it was written during lockdown, it was heavily inspired by me taking long walks around the fields and the environment where I grew up. I’ve always been influenced by that, but this time I was forced to actually live down there during the lockdown and confront it.”

As he was preparing to leave for Dublin again, a letter arrived. The motorway project had been approved.

“Everything I had fallen in love with was about to be destroyed by this new motorway. The fact that the album ends with that is tragic in a way. But it’s also a new road, which could be a new beginning too.”

Ultimately, the bulldozers spared the house.

“The road is still being built, but it’s not going through the house. It’s going to loop around it. It’s not as apocalyptic, but it’s still going to vastly change the environment. It was quite devastating at the time, I couldn’t listen back to that song for ages. But I knew the album had to end with that song.”

The End.

LONGING FOR HOME

Kealy grew up in Kilcummin, outside Killarney. Moving away, almost a decade ago now, set off a form of longing for his home.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the environment – that rural atmosphere I couldn’t put my finger on. For some reason, as soon as I moved out of home, I just began to feel it more and more. I think that’s tied to homesickness as well. I got a little bit obsessed with that.”

When the pandemic forced him back to Kerry, reality didn’t align with his memory.

“I couldn’t actually write about the environment I claimed I was inspired by when I was confronted by it, at first,” he says. “It was a sort of a shock to the system or something, having to live in it. Maybe it was too real.

“Then I moved back down when Covid hit once again, and then I was able to write. And I wrote the whole album from start to finish in those few months. The first song is the first song I wrote, and the last song is the last song I wrote. So it’s a map of my experience through that time.

“It was a great opportunity to write an album like that from afresh. Because of that, there are themes that reoccur later in the album that occurred earlier in the album. It’s very holistic because of that I think.”
The record is steeped in local folklore, especially tales of people being “led astray” in ringforts: ancient earthen enclosures scattered across the countryside.

“When I wrote the album, I was getting obsessed with certain things,” he says. “I had a lot of time to think and take big long walks around my house. I started noticing ringforts in the landscape. Through that I found resources online that told me what they were. Then I started getting into the UCD folklore collection, and they have manuscripts and records of older people recounting how they experienced these ringforts in different ways, from the ’50s or the ’20s.

“They would get lost on journeys they had made countless times before, usually crossing fields. They’d find a ringfort, they would be led astray and all of a sudden, they wouldn’t know where they were and couldn’t find their way home.

“In fact the first song, ‘Welcome To My Mountain’, is based on an actual account I heard of an old man, saying when he was young, how he got lost in a ringfort. He could see a huge blue mountain in front of him, and was able to hear water as well.”

Even as he was drawing from centuries-old tales, the parallel with modern technology came naturally.

“Getting lost in these ringforts reminded me of being on my phone,” says the singer. “You escape into something and that can drive you into a state of mind which is kind of hard to come out of.

“Making that link also made me link these local folk tales to the modern day. We’re experiencing modern life through the phone, the same way that somebody would experience their journey home through getting lost in a ringfort.”

Some songs tackle the way people were sucked into online extremism during the pandemic. On ‘Today My Uncle Told Me’, Kealy describes the effect of seeing people close to him fall under the sway of online algorithms.

Junior Brother on August 19th, 2025. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

EXPERIENCE WITH TWITTER

“Somebody that you’re close to, and who you’d think of as quite a reasonable, sane person, sitting down one day and talking about things that completely isolate you from them. It’s a worrying indicator of these algorithms that can suck people in.”

His own experience with Twitter formed the basis of ‘Small Violence’.

“I’m off Twitter now,” he says. “I should have gone off it a long time ago. I was addicted to it at the time. People would say it’s only words, it’s only free speech. But that snowballs into violence. The chorus goes, ‘From little words to little hands spreads small violence’.

“It goes from being the typed word to someone actually doing something because of those words and how hateful they are.

“‘Small Violence’ is at the beginning and ‘Today My Uncle Told Me’ is at the end. Those two songs are linked. They’re more explicitly about being sucked into far right or far right adjacent ideas. Having them on either end of the album, the shadow of the two songs stretches across the space between them.”

Music has rarely felt as politicised as it does these days. Does Kealy feel responsible, as an artist, to write about the ugly truths and injustices in the world?

“It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore certain things that are happening. Especially now that we’re so exposed to everything, with this thing in our pockets that everybody has. To ignore certain things has become political.

“It’s been said again and again, especially in Ireland with our obvious connection to colonial oppression. Seeing that anywhere else – we do have a duty to at least show solidarity with another country’s experience of pretty much the same thing.

“In the case of what’s going on in Palestine, it’s even worse than even we could have imagined.”

On the music side of The End, Kealy deliberately restricted himself to a small palette: drums, accordion, whistle, mandolin, guitar.

“I wanted it to sound like an Irish traditional music orchestra, like Seán Ó Riada’s Ceoltóirí Chualann. He did the soundtrack to The Playboy Of The Western World. That was a huge inspiration for the sound of this album.

“I wanted it to sound like a trad quintet. I had five instruments in particular, and I wanted to arrange everything for those five instruments. It gave the album a holistic feel as well, and gave it its own world.”

He also leaned on the otherworldly.

“I was also influenced by accounts of music that people have heard from ring forts,” says the singer. “Lots of accounts of people walking down country roads by a ringfort and hearing this otherworldly music.

But the music was always Irish trad. People who would explain how it sounded would never be able to actually explain it. That really inspired me in the sound of the album as well. Trying to actually recreate what that music might have sounded like.”

For all the folk references in the lyrics and the instruments, The End sounds anything but antique. He cites post-punk acts Gilla Band as another core influence.

“I was using these Irish traditional instruments in ways that sort of reflected maybe electronic music, or reflected more avant-garde music. I was listening to a lot of post-punk bands at the time, trying to reflect that energy too.”

Venturing beyond the usual, especially in a genre like folk, will inevitably stir up some ire among traditionalists.

FAVOURITE IRISH ACTS

“The new record touches on trad purists,” Kealy says. “All my favourite Irish acts all do their own thing. Tradition shouldn’t be caged in. It shouldn’t be trapped, or preserved, because that’s not how it got to where it is in the first place. You don’t have something going for hundreds of years without being changed. You can see that looking at the stories of traditional Irish instruments. A banjo doesn’t come from Ireland, a bodhrán only came in the 20th century, the fiddle does not come from Ireland at all – it was brought in.”

Kealy elaborates on the theme.

“Tradition is an ever evolving thing,” he continues. “So you have to think of Irish trad in two ways. One world wants to preserve it, but that side has to allow the other side to keep evolving it. I wouldn’t consider myself part of any tradition to be honest. I just take great inspiration from that tradition, and take my own experience and funnel it into my own work, to make it a more personal type of art.”

For an artist so drawn to the word “end”, Kealy isn’t near finished. He’ll be touring the new record up until the end of November, and is warmed up too, after spending the last while opening for Libertines frontman Pete Doherty.

“It was great, we spent a few days in Edinburgh and did two shows with him,” Kealy says of the experience. “It was during the Fringe, and Oasis were playing, so things were quite busy. For a small city, there was a lot going on. I really enjoyed the gigs with Peter. He’s been incredibly supportive and kind to me over the last year-and-a-bit.

“He’s got a great crew of people around him. I’m fond of him as a person, he’s a great fella. He’s given me a lot of encouragement. He was talking to me about ‘Take Guilt’ [from The End], and how much that song meant to him.

“It’s always great to hear responses to my lyrics from outside of Ireland. Gigging outside of Ireland, people take [the music] more for what it is, rather than hearing the accent or the elements of trad music in the arrangements. They take it at face value. I love that. It’s a different perspective, and makes the music stand up in a way that maybe it wouldn’t.”

• The End is released on September 5. Junior Brother plays Music Zone, Cork on September 11, and The Grand Social, Dublin on September 13 & 14.