Nialler9

The hosts of the Nialler9 Podcast (Niall Byrne and Andrea Cleary) in conjunction with The Big Romance present the Listen Closely series of listening parties, a night featuring a focus album from an artist we love on the last Wednesday of the month. To accompany the monthly listening party on Wednesday February 28th – 7.30pm @ The Big Romance , we present a Nialler9 Podcast episode all about this m...

On this week's pod, it's a deep dive into an album from one of our perennial favourites, as it celebrates 20 years. It's the turn of the MF DOOM and Madlib's classic 2004 album Madvillainy by Madvillain, a dense, psychedelic, colourful rap album that quickly cemented itself as one of the best rap albums of all time when it came out on Stones Throw that year. Why is Madvillain so important? It's th...

The Nialler9 Podcast returns for another season and new year. After taking January off, Niall and Andrea are back discussing what has been happening in music since we closed off the year with the Best of 2023 episodes including Pitchfork's downsizing, the state of music journalism and the Enshittification of online music discovery and discourse, and online life in general? The Choice Music Prize I...

Our final podcast of the year is the fun rapid-fire Podcast Awards! In a year where AI, touring became more difficult for musicians, and Spotify squeezed the emerging artists, We give out awards for things like: Best live gig Best live performance Villain of the year Thing we'd like to go away Best opening song lyric Best bagpipes solo The Alan Maguire Award horny for photoshoots award Best rap gu...

It's the second of our end of year podcasts as Nialler and Andrea Cleary talk 12 albums they loved this year. Featuring albums from Lankum, Boygenius, Noname, Andre 3000, Olivia Rodrigo, Rachael Lavelle, Lana, Kara Jackson, Mitski and more. Next episode: The Nialler9 Podcast Awards 2023. Special thanks to Georgia Hallion for editing this podcast episode. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event di...

Episode 235 features Nialler and Andrea Cleary highlighting some of their favourite songs of the year. We are talking tracks we loved from Lankum, Lana, Big Thief, Troye Sivan, CMAT, The Hives, Sofia Kourtesis, Mustafa, Olivia Rodrigo, Rachel Lavelle, Overmono, boygenius and more. All killer no filler. Next episode: Albums of 2023. Special thanks to Georgia Hallion for editing this podcast episode...

Episode 234 is the latest in the occasional series of the podcast - Andrea's favourite weird little guy. Nialler and Andrea Cleary take a big overview of the main discography of one of our favourite songwriters. Sufjan Stevens is a Detroit Michigan artist, songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist who has a deep catalogue of studio albums drawing on orchestral conceptual releases about US Sta...

On this week’s podcast, episode 233, we are talking about what we learned from fairly shocking Britney Spears’ new autobiography The Woman In Me. Nialler and Andrea Cleary are joined by pop culture writer and DJ Louise Bruton to discuss the chilling details that Britney Spears reveals about her career and private life. That includes her treatment by the media, fame-hungry exes Justin Timblerake an...

It's the Nialler9 Podcast's monthly episode where Niall and Andrea talk about the albums and songs they loved in the last four weeks. Episode 232 has an exoskeleton theme of accidental spooky picks as we feature new albums from Kojaque, OXN, CMAT, Sufjan, Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist and new songs from The Last Dinner Party, I Dreamed I Dream, John Francis Flynn, Rachael Lavelle and Tandem...

This week's episode is a chat around the sale of Bandcamp from Epic Games to Songtradr. With streaming paying pennies or less than for many artists, the independently-driven music platform Bandcamp is the last bastion of online revenue making for many bands - allowing musicians to sell their music digitally, and on vinyl or CD direct to their fans. Artists on Bandcamp collectively earned $193 mill...

The Fandom of Taylor Swift is something that I find so fascinating, particularly the massive surge in popularity in the last 3 or 4 years. Where Taylor couldn’t sell out Croke Park in 2018 on her Reputations tour, her current Eras tour as we’ve discussed before on the podcast , crashed Ticketmaster and has seen such a huge unprecedented demand that that’s worth exploring why? With the three Dublin...

English electronic musician Kieran Hebden has been a constant artist in my life’s history of listening to music. Recently, the artist has exploded in popularity in his DJ partnership with Skrillex and Fred Again.., but as we’ll discuss, headlining Coachella this year, was just a natural culmination of two decades plus of music making and collaborations. On this week’s episode it is all about the m...

It's the Nialler9 Podcast's monthly episode where Niall and Andrea talk about the albums and songs we loved in the last four weeks. On Episode 228 we are album focused with new LP chat about records from Mitski, Cleo Sol, The Alchemist, MIKE and Wiki; Olivia Rodrigo, Soda Blonde, Natalia Beylis and an EP from Soccer Mommy. There are songs from Annika Kilkenny , Holly Humberstone and two Golden old...

On Episode 227, we are joined by the acclaimed music writer Bob Stanley, the man behind one of Niall's favourite books Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop and a member of indie-pop group St. Etienne. To celebrate 10 years of Faber Books are reissuing Yeah Yeah Yeah (with a new chapter taking it up to present day) , along with its prequel Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop (the definitive story of t...

The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, the JAMs, the Timelords, The KLF. Episode 226 is a look at the UK band that simultaneously topped the pop charts while being divisive art provocateurs. Two British men, the Scotsman Bill Drummond and Englishman Jimmy Cauty created a notorious music project that engulfed the charts, aggravated the art world, upset the capitalists, annoyed the record industry and alm...

It's the Nialler9 Podcast's monthly episode where Niall and Andrea talk about the albums and songs they loved in the last four weeks. On Episode 225 we have album recommendations from The Hives, Citrus Fresh and Noname along with song inclusions from Sufjan, Diners, BadBadNotGood, Cartin, Barry Can't Swim and Olivia Rodrigo. Plus what's consuming you, chat about live gigs from The Walkmen, Boygeni...

Episode 224 is a deep dive into the discography of electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin. t's Richard D James, "the godfather of IDM", "the Mozart of Ambient,", the mischievous enigmatic man who I shook hands with once, the artist born in Limerick who has been making weird electronic music since he was the age of 14 for over 35 years now. As Richard D James turns 52 this Friday, we take a chronologi...

Episode 223 of the Nialler9 Podcast is a return to the festival field with Nialler9 and Andrea Cleary. We review last weekend's All Together Now Festival in Waterford. Niall shares his experiences of the festival's fourth year, a weekend in which ran the weather gamut from rainy to windy, muddy to sunny. We talk highlights and lowlights, the mud, the rain, the wind, festival organisational logisti...

It's the most popular monthly episode where Niall and Andrea share what's moved them musically from the month of July. On Episode 222 we have selections from Big Thief, Sarah Crean, Andrea's pick of the Barbie soundtrack, another of Niall's song of the summer contenders, Fizz, Aluna, Mitski, The Hives, girlfriend, albums from Blur and Joanna Sternberg and some a tune tribute to Sinéad O'Connor. *...

30 years ago this week, Singer Sinead O’Connor sparked outrage when she tore up a picture of the Pope during her musical performance on Saturday Night Live. The fallout of that action is at the centre of Kathryn Ferguson's new documentary about Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares - which is in cinemas this Friday. Following the release of last year's Rememberings, O'Connor's biography, the film tel...

This is a rewind of an episode from 2021. Today's episode is all about my favourite subgenre of disco and dance music - Italo. What it is, where it came from and why it's so enduring. Italo disco is a European form of electronic disco that proliferated throughout Europe in the early '80s. It’s a catch all term for 80s electronic pop of mostly Italian origin. Italo is what happens when disco starts...

For a subgenre deep dive, Niall takes a dip into the idea of Balearic music, and finds out that it's not as easy to explain as he first thought. Balearic is often thought of as a signifier of music that is evocative, sun-kissed and downtempo, but as our deep dive discovers Balearic is a feeling, an approach, that encompasses those things but also can be cheesy, soft, rocking, easy listening, dance...

Note, this is a rewind of an episode from 2021 to mark our second Indie Sleaze night on September 29th in Workman's Cellar. You may have heard of the term Indie Sleaze lately. A term newly coined to describe a nostalgic trend of post-Y2K era of culture and aesthetics of indie music and parties that crossed cities and continents. Niall and Andrea are talking indie-rock, blog house, nu-rave, electro...

Episode 220 is a chat with the journalist, pop culture writer, and author Michael Cragg . Michael's new book Reach for the Stars is a rip-roaring oral history of UK pop music between 1996 and 2006, told through the interviews with the popstars, the songwriters, producers, label executives, pop fans, svengalis and culture writers of the day. It's an unputdownable behind-the-scenes history of Britis...

It's the ever popular monthly episode where Niall and Andrea share what's moving them musically from the month of June - new music and older stuff too. On Episode 219 we have selections from King Krule, The Hives, Bright Eyes, Peter Gabriel, Maija Sofia, Glasser, Slaughter Beach, Dog, Niall's song of the summer contender and some oldie shouts from Surfers, Freestylers, Joy Anonymous and Bikini Kil...