New to Hot Press: RUNAH

The music of Dublin’s RUNAH is constantly traversing genres, from folk to ambient to electronic and everywhere in between. But one connecting thread in her songs is that they all tell a story.

“I grew up in a family of storytellers,” says the Manchester-born singer-songwriter. “I was brought up with my mum telling me I was a witch.”

A childhood spent absorbing these tales blossomed into a love for writing stories of her own, heavily inspired by fairy tales and nature. It wasn’t until RUNAH was in her early twenties, however, that she decided to pick up her brother’s guitar and learn to play. Becoming a musician wasn’t a conscious decision, she says, but rather something that developed organically as her stories adapted to the musical realm.

This year saw the release of RUNAH’s debut album, a compendium of tales entitled Strange. A “celebration of [the] wild feminine,” the record centres around the essential theme that we, as human beings, are all strange. For her next album, though, RUNAH plans to shift her focus onto nature as a lens for exploring the human condition. She’s already begun to reveal her vision with the recently released title track, 'Mother,' written from the perspective of the unborn child of Mother Earth.

“We were just the creation and she’s this wild creator,” she says of the track. “But if you can create something, you can destroy it just as easily. There’s a chaotic theory to it as well as this reverence to what gave us life.”

RUNAH opens for HAVVK at BelloBar, Dublin on December 6.