Picture This - We look back on an incredible year for the Athy Duo

Picture This. Two lads. One online music video. Dozens of sold-out concerts and thousands upon thousands of fans. This is the world that Ryan Hennessey and Jimmy Rainsford inhabit. From out of absolutely nowhere, the two gentlemen dropped like a hydrogen bomb onto the Irish music scene; and while they’ve been a fixture in the charts ever since, they’ve also been confounding industry experts and business suits at the same time. Picture This are homegrown DIY luminaries with their very own army of followers.

When I meet Ryan and Jimmy, bouncing out of Warner Music Studios, I’ve just enough time to chat to the lads before they head out to do a secret-location gig (at Doyle’s Ruby Sessions, as it turned out). In a matter of hours, the Athy duo will go on to sell out five consecutive Olympia Theatre gigs, as well almost every Irish show on their summer tour, then a few days later they’ll release their Yuletide song ‘This Christmas’. All in all, not a bad seasonal gift.

“This has just been one incredible year,” says a beaming Rainsford. “There’s been too many highlights this year to name. We’ve had so many sell-out shows and played at some of Ireland’s best venues and festivals. But for me one of the best things we did was play a gig in our hometown in Athy – which has a population of 10,000 by the way – and 5,000 people turned up for it. That’s a moment I’ll never forget.”

The gig was more than just a sign of the communal support that the duo have received in their hometown, but also a mark of the journey they’ve been on since they started. With Christmas and the New Year being a time for reflection, I ask the boys if they look back on things now and notice the change. “We do and we don’t,” says Ryan. “I do in particular because last year I was living off the dole… So this year I’ve got it a little bit easier (laughs all round). I mean I’m not gonna be going round buying everyone a minx fur coat or anything like that, but it’s certainly been better for us. This time last year we were only after writing ‘Take My Hand’ and had about three songs under our belt. So now after playing all those solos shows and festivals and hearing the response from so many different people, it’s been amazing.”

I was lucky enough to snag a ticket to one of Picture This’ sold out Olympia Theatre gigs back in November. The “amazing response” that Ryan is talking about is the way that the packed out audience seemingly knew the lyrics to every single song. Even brand new tunes were belted out with uncharacteristic certainty by the fans. I ask if there’s some kind of telepathy between the Athy duo and every adoring teenage fangirl in the country.

“We just have an incredible connection with our fans,” says Jimmy. “It’s grown so much because we started what we did online. We would put up a song on Facebook and people would just learn it straight away. Then it became that thing of us writing a song, putting it up, and then a few weeks later we’re singing it to an audience and they’re all singing it back to us. That type of shit never gets old.”

This has proved to be the crux of Picture This’ success. Everything the band does, right from new music to big tour announcements, is all done by the lads themselves online. Straight from them to the fans. Earlier on in the year, Picture This signed with Republic Records in New York, a move which proved to be more beneficial for the record company than anyone else. As Jimmy explains: “We’re leading the way in terms of doing music differently and it seems to be working better than what the record labels are doing. So when they started to come to us, they liked what we were doing and wanted to get behind us without changing anything, just help push us along. So there’s no sense of us getting signed and losing control of things. It just means that now we can dream a bit bigger in terms of what’s possible and where we can take our music.”

These are all promising signs for a band who have a serious appetite for making as much music as possible. With their EP already a chart-topper, I can’t let them get away without bringing up the “A” word.

“We do have plans for an album,” Ryan confirms. “I’m not going to say we don’t because we definitely do. But we’re going to keep doing things the way we’ve always been doing them in terms of getting the music out online first. We get the biggest buzz from releasing our songs that way. And we’ve got a lot of songs in the bag, so next year is going to be all about letting people hear that new music.”

There’s a conspiratorial glint in the eyes of the Kildare men as they talk about what the future might hold. It leads me to believe that, despite 2016 most definitely being their year, these lads haven’t even begun to peak in terms of what they can do. Ring in 2017 boys, let’s see what comes next.