LIMERICK rapper Willzee of Traveller descent is set to release a culturally significant album rooted in ancestral memory, political history and lived experience. Known for his honest writing and a hybrid sound fusing rap, Irish folk and spoken word, his new album Deep Tinker releases on Friday, May 22. Across ten tracks, Willzee draws on personal experience and collective memory, exploring marginalisation, family and resilience. Collaborators include Steo Wall, Sharyn Ward, Enda Gallery, Strange Boy and T.O.H. “This album is my story, but it’s also our story.”
Willzee, who spent his childhood in foster care, releases Deep Tinker on Friday May 22. The album draws on years of academic study, community work and a personal drive to reclaim and celebrate Traveller identity in a society he says continues to marginalise his people.
“It’s like my ancestors awaken in me each time I hear this album,” he says.
The project was seeded by the 2025 single Travelling Man, in which Willzee blended Irish folk melody with rap and spoken-word poetry. In it, he coined the term “TraBuffer” — a person of Traveller blood and settled rearing — to describe his own layered identity. “I’ve tapped into my settled artistry for years,” he declared at the time. “Now it’s time to give the Traveller in me a go.”
Deep Tinker builds on that foundation. Produced alongside Enda Gallery, the record weaves the sounds of traditional folk instrumentation — whistles, bodhráns, and bones — and underneath, the crackle of a campfire, a sonic thread that runs throughout the album. “I really wanted to capture the old with the new,” Willzee explains. “To take the style of music back into traditional folk and honour the uncles and aunties who inspired me.”
The latest single, Let It Rain, featuring spoken-word artist Sharyn Ward, confronts the lasting damage of the 1963 Commission on Itinerancy — a government report that shaped decades of hostile policy toward the Traveller community and was drawn up without meaningful Traveller representation. Willzee studied its effects during four years of college research into the Travelling community and addiction.
“I started to study it and then I was like, no, I really want to make songs about this,” he says. The consequences of that era, he argues, are still being felt. Traveller communities face a life expectancy up to 15 years lower than the national average, elevated suicide rates, limited access to education and chronic underfunding. “This is not just history,” he says. “It’s a reality still being lived.”
Alongside the album, Willzee is deeply embedded in community outreach work, bringing creative projects to young people on halting sites across Limerick, Cork, Galway, Clare and Tipperary — including a collaboration with aerial circus company Fidget Feet for children aged seven to fifteen. He is also involved in a multi-year peer mentorship programme through the Irish Aerial Centre, where he is currently the only Traveller participant.
“Some of the greatest talent in the country is within halting sites,” he says. “It’s just that there is an imaginary boundary between leaving the halting site and entering into society.”
He is candid about his own difficult past, and deliberate in sharing it with young people he works with. “I wear my wrongs as much as I wear my rights. I want to show people that no matter how many dips and bumps along the road, there is a chance to be something positive in your community.”
“This album is a mix of personal experience, life and political issues delivered over folk music. I just want to say a massive thank you to Enda Gallery and the people who have played on the album, people who have supported the album. I’m very, very much appreciative of them, because without them it would be just acapellas.”
Willzee will bring the album to a live audience at the Beyond the Pale festival later this year.
Deep Tinker is released on Friday May 22.