Rising singer-songwriter Ellie O’Neill performs a free, all-ages in-store show and signing at Steamboat — Instruments, Records & Comics this Saturday June 13 at 2pm.
The intimate afternoon event coincides with the release of O’Neill’s debut album Time of Fallow, a work of quiet, luminous intensity that has already drawn comparisons to some of Ireland’s most celebrated voices.
Time of Fallow is an album that resists easy categorisation. Rather than building toward a single moment of revelation, it offers an archive of memory and feeling — an ongoing negotiation between what must be preserved and what must be released. O’Neill’s music moves with the rhythm of a river, clear and unhurried, allowing romance and grief to coexist without resolution. She lingers on two or three chords for as long as they remain alive, then turns, suddenly, in an entirely new direction.
The roots of the album stretch back to O’Neill’s undergraduate years, when she was studying English and writing her thesis on queer temporality in the modernist novel. Her songs reflect that same sensibility — refusing chronology, resisting tidy conclusions. Many of the lyrics draw directly on the period when she was coming into her own queerness while navigating an intense and difficult love. It was also a moment of profound change for Ireland: O’Neill turned 18 the year the country legalised same-sex marriage and was 21 when the abortion ban was repealed.
Compared to Sinéad O’Connor and Dolores O’Riordan in her command of pure, unadorned emotion, O’Neill is a songwriter of rare conviction. Time of Fallow is not a statement of arrival so much as a patient, repeating practice — sifting memory, moving through grief, and finally, at the album’s close, letting go.
Entry to the Steamboat event is free. Further information is available at steamboat.ie.