With so many top pop, rock, dance and hip-hop acts available to check out on social media, you might think there’d be limited space for folk. However, this is emphatically not the case, with Irish audiences always keen to see what’s happening in the genre. A new act generating a buzz is Dubliner Niamh Bury, who recently signed to the storied Claddagh label.

“They obviously have such a history of promoting Irish music, and trad and folk music in particular,” she enthuses. “It’s really nice to have an Irish label working on the ground in Dublin rather than somewhere else. I’m a big fan of some of their other acts too, like ØXN and Lemoncello. Everyone is taking folk and trad in their own direction.”

But why is there such an appetite for folk right now?

“I think with traditional folk songs, the reason they are brought up time and again is that the themes are so universal,” Bury reflects. “They tend to cover all bases. Even now, myself and a lot of the women singers in traditional circles are reimagining the female characters in the songs. For example there’s a song called ‘Banks Of The Nile’ that I sing, and her love is going off to war. And she’s like, ‘Oh, I want to come with you, but the only way for me to do this is to dress up as a man and join the army’. So there’s a lot of that subversive cross-dressing stuff.”

Bury also sees folk as a reprieve from the otherwise chaotic and noisy world we inhabit.

“I have been told in a complimentary way that it’s like ‘sleepy music’, which I’m all for,” she chuckles. “I think life is extremely noisy, and for me, songwriting is a way to ground myself. If that comes through in the music for listeners too, that makes me really happy. Songwriting is a way to reconnect with that inner self, because we’re always pulled in a thousand different directions by all the opinions thrown at us. I guess that’s what art is. It’s the ability to go inwards, and see how you feel and reconnect with that voice.”

Yellow Roses, Bury’s excellent debut LP, is definitely a grounding experience not just for its creator, but for the listener too.

“I definitely see this as an album to sit around the fire to,” she says. “The title track is a song I wrote about my grandmother. She was an example in my life of taking the bad stuff and turning it into something hopeful. She loved yellow roses, they were her favourite flower, and they were blooming when she passed away, so that’s where the title comes from.

“She loved animals and beauty and plants. She loved dressing up too. But she also had really difficult circumstances in her life. So I guess that feeling of hope, in spite of the dark stuff, is what I get from the album.”

The singer notes the the record has been in the making a long time.

“It’s been a journey,” reflects Niamh. “The songs have been with me for quite a long time. That’s the case for many first albums, because in a way, it’s a collection of your greatest hits. It’s really nice for me to arrive at a place where I can send the album off, and hope the songs land with people.”

Yellow Roses is out now. Niamh Bury plays an Irish tour this month, with dates including the Roisin Dubh, Galway (April 21); Dolan's, Limerick (24); Cleere's, Kilkenny (25); Winthrop Ave, Cork (26); and Whelan's, Dublin (28).