Irish trio Chasing Abbey play Brighton on back of new album

Cyber Celt is the debut album from the Irish trio Chasing Abbey who play Brighton Patterns on Sunday, November 8.

The tour ends in Perth, Australia on December 14.

From Tullamore in Ireland, the trio of multi-instrumentalists, producers and vocalists Ronan Bell, Jonathan Byrne and Ted Conway fuse traditional Celtic instrumentation with modern electronic production and are influenced by performers including Kneecap, Lankum and The Mary Wallopers, artists who – as they say –use the beautiful language of Gaeilge to deliver their lyrics with maximum weight.

“Kneecap reignited the flame, in a way,” says Ted. “We feel it’s our responsibility to use that to progress our culture and tradition in the same way we’ve been doing it through our music, and it’s often easier for us to express that in our native language.”

Cyber Celt is a coming together of the past, present and future, in which Chasing Abbey reflect on the lessons they can glean from their ancestors while also learning from their mistakes. As Ted says, they infuse their music with a strong political bent, melding themes of pride, defiance, heritage and tradition with messages against corruption, greed and colonialism.

“We have a moral code that we live by – you have to, in these times. It’s pretty crazy out there and you’ve got a lot of racism, a lot of hatred, bigotry, sexism, the whole shebang. It feels rampant at the moment. So everybody has a duty to try and stand against it because we can’t just let it go on. This is the purpose of music, of being an artist.”

The latest single Greedy Pigs stems from this philosophy, influenced by Conway’s time working as a butcher with his uncles and grandfather. It’s a song about people who are wholly consumed by greed, blind to any consequence of suffering of others.

“I noticed there was always one pig that bullied the rest and ate all the food. His greed could not be satisfied. He would eat and eat and eat, and he became massive. But the thing about that was, he was fast tracking himself to the slaughterhouse. I see a lot of parallels in today’s world – greed for the sake of it, greed that cannot be satisfied or quenched and the song draws on those observations.

“Íorónta, meanwhile, is a song about the oppression of the Irish people and the oppression that still takes place around the world today. The Irish word for ironic, it points out how those who fight back against colonialism or genocide are routinely labelled terrorists and highlights the deep-rooted trauma of peoples who have had their rights, language, culture and history snatched away from them.

“We understand how these systems work and how the oppressors manipulate the narrative to make it seem like those they are oppressing are the criminals. So there’s a solidarity between the Irish and others, like the people of Palestine, who are going through that today.”