New release from Bring Your Own Hammer to feature Bernard Butler and Fergal Lawler

A new release from Bring Your Own Hammer's Music and History series is set to feature Bernard Butler, Fergal Lawler, June Miles-Kingston, and Mike Smalle.

Due out this Autumn, From The Tombs is a double album, containing 21 songs. It takes the listener on a journey through the history of crime, law, and order in Ireland and among the Irish Diaspora of the nineteenth century.

Featuring Ian Catt, Terry Edwards, Marcus Holdaway, and more, the record follows 2025's My Grief on the Sea.

In May, the group will release the album's title track. Rooted in the story of an Irish servant in New York City in 1881, the pop song reflects on the story of a woman committed to the Tombs, charged with infanticide.

Convicted of manslaughter, sentenced, and sent to Blackwell Island, the servant was released two years later for good behaviour. Right after, she disappeared from the historical record completely.

From the Tombs' is a sequel song to, and largely based on the same sources as, 'Old Oak Road' by Smalle with Cathal Coughlan and Jah Wobble from My Grief on the Sea.

The project describes itself as not a band, but "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," they said.

For more information about Bring Your Own Hammer and their work visit here.