Northern Irish singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside releases his debut album Ephrata on 5 May via Quiet Arch Records. Written in a burst of a few weeks whilst living in northern Colombia, the songs on the album deal with a diverse range of themes, from PTSD and technophobia, to larger questions about time, love and death in the modern age. Balanced with a diverse palette of sounds, Burnside deftly blends alt-folk and elements of the Irish folk song tradition with South American rhythms and Eastern European influences, whilst introducing synthetic and found-sounds, synths loops and crunching beats to create a stormy world that shifts and swirls perspective like a lingering lucid dream.

Burnside released his critically acclaimed first EP If Your Goin That Way in 2013, which was described by The Irish Times as; “Rumbling, brooding, powerful, magnetic.” The lead single “Black Dog Sin” received numerous radio plays from Gideon Coe and Lauren Lavern on 6 Music and went on to notch up 1.5 million plays on Spotify and over 50,000 plays on YouTube.