Did you like Mumford & Sons when not everyone could sing along to the hits? Do you appreciate a glass of Irish whiskey? And do you ever feel melancholic? We have something for you: As Ye Vagabonds, the brothers Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn play heartfelt songs with stone-softening melodies that always deftly stroll along the border between Irish folk traditional and international indie pop conventions.
The heart not only rests where the soul sighs, but also where the tea kettle whistles, it says in “Where The Heart Lies” – these are the kinds of things the two brothers, who come from a village south of Dublin, sing. They are now filling the big halls in their homeland with their band, and one has to give them credit for not breaking the well-known Irish clichés, but at least carefully modernizing them.
A butterfly sometimes flies through a text, and “Long Grass” grows across ideological differences, but their songs are not limited to nature metaphors; they describe dysfunctional relationships, complex emotional states and even social moods. An example is the song “Mayfly”, in which the titular mayfly is a symbol of an exciting but also self-consuming life. Then a whiskey or two!
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.
