Live Report: Niall Breslin captivates hearts and minds at intimate Camden Studios album launch

When Niall Breslin says he's launching an album, you can be certain it will be anything but typical. That goes for both the album itself and the event introducing it to the world.

Last week, Bressie gathered a collection of friends, fellow musicians and a few press in the cosy, intimate space of Dublin's Camden Recording Studios.

Before discussing the music of The Place That Has Never Been Wounded, it's worth describing the atmosphere of Camden Studios.

Up the bustling Wexford Street, past Whelan's and various other exuberant watering holes, down a quiet offshoot of Camden Street is an inconspicuous neon sign. Inside, there is a small reception room, leading into the main recording space.

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

And what a recording space it is. Warmly lit, elegantly decorated, with a pristine Steinway grand piano sat over a vast Persian rug. Past there is a cozy control room featuring a gorgeous analogue console and a pair of record producers preparing for the event ahead.

A bit further and you'll find a back room that feels made for such an event; a communal space featuring cushy couches and oak barrels mounted to the wall, plus a full kitchen stocked with wine and baked goods (with Bressie's face on them, of course).

This doesn't feel like an album launch. This feels like a gathering of dear friends.

Now, the music is still the spotlight. Bressie gathers everyone in the main recording space, taking a seat at the piano as a string quartet settles next door.

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

The space has been the birthplace of music by everyone from Sinead O'Connor to Ed Sheeran, but it feels as if it was made for Bressie (after all, he and pianist Cian Boylan re-opened the place).

After thanking all in attendance, Bressie recites a quote from Medieval theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart: "There's a place in the soul where you've never been wounded."

"We keep telling people to be more of something all the time and we don't actually tell them what's already within them, what they're capable of," Bressie elaborates.

"And that's what the entire album's about. It's about that theme of, if you're still standing after the utter shitshow we've been served for the last 10 years, you don't need to be more resilient. You're the very definition of resilient. I think we need to hear that a little bit more.

"The other theme of the album is impermanence. Everything changes, no matter how much we want things to stay the same. I'm 45. I'm getting older. It's great craic, but you can't stop change and I think there's a real power in accepting it."

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

What follows is not a concert as much as it is an emotional release. As Bressie describes, the noise of hustle culture and optimisation and constant forward motion begins to quiet. There is no momentum in the warm space of Camden Studios. There is no chaos. There is only stillness.

That stillness is a theme in the music itself, and in the core inspiration of the music: meditation. After 'Be the Mountain', an intricately arranged contemplation on Bressie's lifelong love for Benbulbin in Co. Sligo, he divulges his thoughts on the genre of meditation music.

"The idea that piece of music is trying to represent in meditation is that when you start to see a mountain, you see how vast it is, and then you realise how despite the seasons changing it remains steadfast and unshakable, and you can feel that in the music because that's what it's meant to portray," Bressie explains.

"Every meditation album I haven't liked because they're all loop-based, but the mind isn't loop-based. I don't know about your mind but my mind is chaotic. It goes in 40 different directions in a second. I wanted to make an album that acknowledges that."

He adds with a laugh: "Also, I always used to listen to meditation music and it made me need to pee. That's a weird thing about meditation music. There's always water trickling water over the music and so mid-mediation I would be like, 'oh man, I have to piss'. I didn't want to make music that made people need to pee."

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

While Bressie's spoken word captivates ears and his inter-song banter earns plenty of chuckles, his voice isn't the only one we hear.

He reveals the original title of the album was "the voice of the small," referring to "the voices in Ireland that we don't hear all the time."

"They're not the big names that we hear speaking and on TV, they're the subtle voices that Ireland has," he says, adding, "Maybe, to be honest with you, they don't want to be on the TV, but they're still important voices. And there's certain voices in this country that I think represent that for me."

People, he explains, like Buddhist writer and commentator Michael Harding— who Bressie fondly calls "the Irish Buddha."

"Michael Harding taught me a lot that I don't think he meant to teach me, but he did. There's something about how he looks at things and how he talks about them. He's also got this voice, it's just the best voice. I brought him into the studio and recorded his voice. When you record a voice, you always have to fix stuff and change it and EQ it and compress it. But he has the perfect voice. You don't touch it."

Bressie describes Harding's unique approach to depression, framing it as a point of growth rather than a decline or failure.

Along with Harding's teachings, Bressie recounts the story of learning his mother's routine operation went awry and rushing to the hospital to be with her. He recalls being terrified, having no idea what would happen, but cracking jokes to cheer her up.

"It was fairly recently after the 2023 anti-immigrant riots and I remember sitting in the hospital ICU with my mother and just seeing these immigrant doctors who took care of her and telling them, 'I'm so grateful you're here.' That's the kind of thing you see when you're in those positions of fear and depression. The things that lift your soul. That's the reason I call this next track 'Midday Moon', because the moon's always in the sky, we just don't always see it."

'Midday Moon' features Harding's voice discussing such gratitude, with some of the most soul-stirring piano and string arrangements of the whole album.

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

He also describes lessons he learned from the recently departed Manchán Magan, ahead of another song about the value of the natural world in mindfulness.

"In mindfulness, there are all these metaphors and visualisations around the land. The land is really important in mindfulness because it teaches us so much and for me, lessons from the land have also been lessons from pagan Ireland and ancient Ireland. I used to speak to Manchán so many times about this," he explains, pausing in reflection.

"God, you know, we lost such wisdom when we lost Manchán. At his funeral, there was something his brother said that really stood out. He said, 'what a difference one man can make' and I remember thinking that that's the line a lot of us should hear. Everybody has the ability to do something or change something, and he certainly did.

"I remember when I went out to him when he got sick. His pain so bad that he couldn't get up much, and his garden was completely overgrown. I said to him, 'You know what? I'm going to bring out the Westmeath County Council and we're going to clean up this for you.' And he goes, 'You are not!' I didn't realise he had been rewilding the whole area for years. We were going to come out and think we were doing him a job, with the Westmeath Council with their chainsaws."

A collective, deeply fond laugh. One could almost hear Magan's voice, kind yet full of conviction, in Bressie's storytelling.

"But the reason I'm talking about that is because we used to talk about the land and how important the land is in terms of teaching us," he continues, adding, "In terms of mindfulness, it's probably the most important teacher."

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

His songs describe the lessons of mountains, of skies, of lakes and even of the Irish bog in the track 'Be the Beauty'.

"There are a lot of people from Dublin here who've never seen a bog, but it's literally kept our country going for generations," he exclaims.

Ireland's vast boglands have been used in various essential ways: Dried peat is used as a fuel to heat the country, peat and mulch are used in farming, berries are harvested from the humid climates, the fresh water storage capacity helps slow down global warming and some distilleries even use the smoke from peat fires to dry barley in the whiskey-producing process.

"I love bogs. I think they look beautiful. When you look at a bog, you think it's just a big dirty field, but actually it's so much more than that," Bressie says.

He quotes from Yeats: "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

"It's about beauty not being an objective truth," Bressie elaborates.

"It's a very simple thing. You can see beauty in everything if you bother your ass to look. You can even see it in a bog. Anyone who's ever worked in a bog knows it's a tough job. I used to work with my friend's dad and he barely spoke English but he could tell me, 'Your payment is a sandwich.' He'd take out this sandwich after about three hours of bollocks work and it'd be a soggy little sandwich and if you don't eat it, that's the end of your day. This lad will literally bury you in the bog. So I ate lots of those sandwiches and I learned to find it beautiful."

And sure enough, 'Be the Beauty' manages to make even a bog beautiful, with Bressie's vibrant poetry overlaid with emotive piano arrangements.

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

Bressie gives the microphone to another teacher later on, this time live: Leading clinical psychologist Dr Tony Bates.

He introduces Dr Bates with a brief explanation of his time on the front line of the most difficult era for mental health in Ireland.

"I think we should have the conversation that we're all and always have been a little bit cracked," Bressie jokes, a comment that Dr Bates would later lightheartedly chide as "a bit negative" in a brief aside to Hot Press. He says it with the fondness of a father chiding his son; aptly, as Bressie speaks of Bates with the admiration of a son describing his father.

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

"Long before we were all talking about this mental health stuff and society was doing this support stuff, Tony was doing important work at the most difficult time in this country," Bressie recalls.

"By 1950, Ireland had the highest level of people in psychiatric institutions in the world. We loved putting people into institutions. We just loved it. But Tony used to say to me, 'I always saw the human in the tragedy.' And that was a really important thing to hear."

Dr Bates joined him for 'That Is How We Heal', and later for a sit-down conversation.

A highlight of that conversation is Bressie's reflection on his career. Or, perhaps, careers.

"I find safety playing music," he tells Dr Bates.

"People always say to me, both when I play music and when I play a sport, 'But you're really anxious, how do you do it?.' And I say, 'Yeah, but I don't have time to think.' Give me time to think and I am quite anxious, but you cannot think when you're playing the piano. You cannot think when you're playing sport. You're in a different state. You're in a different mind."

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

Raised in Mullingar, he represented Westmeath in Gaelic football at minor and Under-21 Championship levels, and played rugby for Leinster, earning him a scholarship to UCD and a spot on the Under-21 national team for the World Cup.

Aside from that, he published his Irish Book Award-winning book Me and My Mate Jeffrey and founded two highly acclaimed podcasts, Where Is My Mind? and Wake Up / Wind Down. He was on TV, too: he judged The Voice of Ireland and had a cameo in Moone Boy.

Through it all, there was music. He and his childhood friends formed The Blizzards in 2004. After their split in 2009, Bressie became a songwriter and producer. He released his first solo album, Colourblind Stereo, in 2011 and his second, Rage and Romance, in 2013. Both were more rock-oriented; mindfulness music is a new arena. And as we've seen, Bressie has no problem excelling in any arena.

However, it hasn't been breezy.

"I remember in the space of maybe two weeks, I got dropped by a record label, a publisher and a podcast platform. It was just one of those absolute kickings that you get and when you're in the creative industry, your entire self-worth is wrapped up in your creative output." he recalls.

Niall Breslin album launch at Camden Recording Studios on October 23rd, 2025. Copyright Patrik Meier/ hotpress.com

"I didn't know what to do with myself. I started reading these inspirational Facebook pages, and I was reading them going, 'I can't connect with these.' I didn't understand 90% of them. There were all these comments of people going, 'So powerful.' But I didn't get it, and I got so frustrated about that.

"But there was one quote that rocked me into reality. And that was this Facebook inspirational quote graphic that said, 'We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky every time.' And people in the comments were like, 'Wow, that's beautiful.' That was a death threat by the IRA to Margaret Thatcher after the Brighton bombing."

Indeed it is. The audience laughs, and Bressie has to pause to contain his laughter at the memory.

"I remember thinking that some guy must have said, 'Let's if they'll buy this.' And they did. We've got to this point in life where we're just pedalling wellness as inspirational quotes to people. It's exhausting to watch.

"But I'm not going to tell you to be a better version of yourself or that you have to be 1% better every day. What I'm telling you through my music is to be the sky. Let all of these things, these worries and doubts, move through you and blow by you. It's not an inspirational quote. It's an invitation to just be, to really experience who we are. That's all the record is."

To accept that invitation, to listen to The Place That Has Never Been Wounded, is to allow oneself to heal.

Bressie's launch created the perfect space for it. This is Bressie renewed, in a night that will not soon be forgotten.