Bring Your Own Hammer has just announced their debut album, My Grief on the Sea, which is brimming with contributions from leading Irish and international composers, musicians and singers including Agu, Linda Buckley, the late Cathal Coughlan of Microdisney, Adrian Crowley, Neil Farrell (of Toasted Heretic Fame), Eileen Gogan, Tony Higgins, Carol Keogh, Michelle O’Rourke, Wally Nkikita, Brigid Mae Power, Michael J Sheehy, Mike Smalle and Jah Wobble.

The debut LP is set for release on March 22 2024.

The project describes itself saying: "It is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century Irish factions, who met, armed with sticks and two-handed wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form".

In what is billed to be the first in a series of major releases from Bring Your Own Hammer, the album offers a collection of songs about the sea, sea journeys and migration to and from Ireland in the nineteenth century. Listeners are invited to journey with the record as the ms criss-cross the Atlantic world following the remaining threads of lives shaped, in one way or another, by the sea. You will hear the echoes of words, from a bog in Co. Roscommon, sung in grief for a lost lover, who has departed overseas in the decades after the Famine on the beautiful title track, Michelle O’Rourke’s ‘My Grief on the Sea’.

You can catch lines written in the letters of migrants to North America, matched with beautiful melodies in the form of 'Golden Streets, Bitter Tears' - Adrian Crowley with Brigid Mae Power.

Listeners can imagine themselves with Carol Keogh on the quays of New Ross in 1849, as Biddy and Catherine Keogh depart for New York on the stunning ‘A Pair of Packed Valises (before the Dunbrody), 1849’.

Laden with historical material, the record was meticulously researched by historians Dr. Richard Mc Mahon and Dr. Niall Whelehan. A lecturer in History at MIC, Limerick Dr Mc Mahon is committed to "engaging in forms of creative history that expose the villainy of the Irish race both on the island and overseas".

Dr Niall Welehan is a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and  has written widely on the history of modern Ireland and the Irish diaspora, mainly with a focus on the long nineteenth century.

My Grief on the Sea Track List: 

1. My Grief on the Sea – Michelle O’Rourke

2. Golden Streets, Bitter Tears - Adrian Crowley with Brigid Mae Power
3. A Pair of Packed Valises (before the Dunbrody), 1849 - Carol Keogh
4. Old Oak Road – Mike Smalle with Cathal Coughlan and Jah Wobble
5. The Man with Open Arms – Cathal Coughlan with Linda Buckley
6. The Female Cabin Boy – Eileen Gogan with Neil Farrell
7. Embarkation (Float Away) – Tony Higgins and Agu
8. Over the Ghosts – Mike Smalle with Wally Nkikita
9. The Oscillating Sea - Mike Smalle
10. The Weight of Water – Michael J Sheehy