Madra Salach look ahead to festival season: "It's a real lift when you’re playing and everyone’s buzzing"

“It’s been pretty hard to wrap my head around it,” Madra Salach’s Jack Martin says of the Dublin folk band’s rise over the past 12 months. “A year ago, we were playing in pubs, so doing those big stages right now is quite surreal. But we’re taking it one step at a time and enjoying the whole thing.”

Madra Salach have maintained their momentum throughout 2026, first with the EP It’s A Hell Of An Age and now with a hugely exciting run of summer festivals. For good measure, they’re also set to support Kneecap at their huge Crystal Palace show this June. The group certainly got plenty of experience at big time gigging in 2025, as Martin acknowledges.

“It kind of made last summer feel like a boot camp!” the mandolin and tin whistle player laughs. “One of my favourite memories with Madra Salach is going down to All Together Now for our first gig. It was at two in the afternoon on the Friday, so we were preparing for a chill show. We arrived at the stage and it was already at capacity – it felt like a big mountain of people.”

Madra Salach are also venturing further afield this summer, playing different international festivals including Primavera – but do they still have a particular attachment to home?

“I’ve been going to Irish festivals since I was a kid,” reflects Martin. “I love that they have this unique charm about them. Every festival, no matter what the line-up is, tends to platform interesting, homegrown artists and performers, creating this very distinct vibe.”

Having recently wrapped up the UK and Irish legs of their tour, the band are eager to return to outdoor summer stages.

“Festivals are a lot livelier,” says Martin. “Everybody’s there to either see as many acts as they can, or have the best possible time they can. It’s a real lift when you’re playing and everyone’s buzzing.”

In another notable achievement, Madra Salach were recently announced for the Shane MacGowan tribute album 20th Century Paddy, alongside the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Hozier.

“That’s a huge moment for us,” Jack enthuses. “Shane MacGowan is obviously our biggest inspiration, the one that brought us all together at the beginning. It’s a huge honour to be even thought about.”

Going back to It’s A Hell Of An Age, it met with both critical and commercial acclaim, hitting number three on the Irish charts. How have the tunes been received live?

“You really notice the response when people have been listening to your tunes,” says Jack. “Especially quieter ones like ‘Murphy Can Never Go Home’. That song is not really in the mainstream, so we wondered how it was going to go down. To hear people singing along t has been nicely surprising.”

Though written from the viewpoint of an emigrant labourer in the ‘60s, the track has huge contemporary resonance, given the ongoing exodus due to the housing crisis.

“It has this yearning and longing for going back home,” says Martin. “It resonates with the thousands of people who’ve moved out of Ireland. It also has this overlying theme of struggling to live within your means, which in the cost-of-living crisis we’re living through now, is quite relevant. I tend to gravitate towards a lot of workers’ songs, because my family have always been in the trade unionist workers’ party – my grandfather was the head of the trade union. Growing up here, I heard a lot of these songs.”

With Madra Salach in the vanguard of a new wave of Irish music that also includes the likes of Kneecap and Lankum, the domestic scene is undoubtedly on the crest of a wave.

“Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn are the kind of artists we looked up to at the beginning,” Martin explains. “So to be in the conversation with these people is pretty mind-boggling. Paul [Banks] has quite a good take on this, so I’ll rob it off him: there’s no way that we could have what England had in the late ‘90s, with Cool Britannia, because it was based around a Labour government.

“People understand the problems with that movement a lot better now, and I think this Irish thing could be a response to that, because we’re an anti-colonial country, but still feel like a safe bet. There’s plenty of other anti-colonial countries that spread similar messages, but it’s easier culturally because we’re also another white country, which is the problem.”

Madra Salach’s music is notably imaginative, mixing noisy experimentation with Irish trad rhythms.

“None of us come from a traditional background, but we’ve all played in bands for years,” says Martin. “We play traditional instruments, but we still have the mindset of an alternative band, which creates this different sound – playing traditional instruments in a non-traditional way.”

How much has the city of Dublin influenced Madra Salach?

“The accessibility to play in pubs and smaller venues in Dublin was huge for us at the beginning,” says Martin. “For all its flaws, we all still really love Dublin. In our hearts, we have a lot of love and reverence for this place, and it’s definitely had an impact on how we write music, and even the songs we chose in the early days.

“It’s tough here, with the amount of venues that are getting shut down. What does happen though, in a funny way, is that you get a very tightly knit community of artists, which is still great.”

Madra Salach play Momentum Festival, Co. Galway (May 4); Beyond The Pale, Co. Wicklow (June 14); Electric Picnic, Co. Laois (August 28-30); and Fuinneamh, Co. Louth (September 12-14).

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