Returning with his new single “Islands”, Fionn Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his Mercury-shortlisted debut album, “The End of History”.

Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s “100 Acres of Sycamore”, whose worry-worn beauty “Dogwood Blossom” drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86. Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. “I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,” says Regan.

Written in Mallorca and rippling like the sea, “Islands” uses images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. Buoyant and urgent, the song introduces his upcoming record’s world with a kind of classicist immediacy; it seems to arrive fully formed, as if the space it evokes is eternal.

“Islands” is Fionn Regan’s first new material since his sixth album “Cala” which was released to universal acclaim in late 2019.

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