Back in April 2025 4AD released an album by Irish musician and songwriter Maria Somerville, an album called Luster. At the time I slept on it a little, not giving it the time it deserved (despite a couple of people raving about it to me. Then, about a year ago I caught up and became mildly obsessed with it. Now, a year on I go back to it every now and then and find something new in it every time.
Maria is from Connemara, Ireland, and picked up singing and playing guitar at an early age from family members. She uploaded some songs in 2013 and got some attention and then self released her debut in 2018. She got a show on NTS radio (a station who are very on the ball with leftfield and non- mainstream music, DJs and selectors) and she would weave field recordings and spoken word tracks into her selections of folk, ambient, shoegaze and dreampop. This in turn seems to have fed into Luster, an album which found its way to the right home with 4AD.
In just under forty minutes Maria pulls together the sounds mentioned above- folk, ambient, shoegaze, dreampop- with some seriously emotive and affecting music, songs that have an indefinable quality but that also speak straight to you. Most of them, I don't know what they're about as such, but I feel as if I know exactly what she means.
There's something mythical about the songs on Luster, something otherwordly and in tune wiht the elements and nature. Halo sounds like its coming in from out at sea, drifting in on a sea mist- a gauze of drones and FX and an unseen choir, an abstract ambient/ shoegaze sound that the words seem to appear out of and then disappear into.
On Trip the metal strings of the guitar chords clang away, coming roughly through the amplifier and an Irish folk influence is there, part of the vocal melody, a nod to the past.
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