Fionn Regan’s 2024 album O Avalanche, available on vinyl for the first time.
“I float sometimes when you’re around,” sings Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan on “Islands”, setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Spain, O Avalanche is an album of levitating intimacies, abstract and intuitive yet infused with a tangible sense of the elevating ties between environment and emotion. Between its sun-dappled backdrops and lambent arrangements, the result is a set of sublime songs and something more: it’s a record to float with, immersive, uplifting and transporting.
His first since 2019’s beautiful Cala, it’s also an album that is, in Fionn’s words, “very much on a level” – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Fionn explains, “I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you’re thinking about it in a visual way, there’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour.”
Rippling like the sea, “Islands” sets that magic-hour mood, using images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. Buoyant and urgent, the song introduces the record’s world with a kind of classicist immediacy; it seems to arrive fully formed, as if the space it evokes is eternal. “When I wrote that song it was like there was something cosmic about it, because it doesn’t sound like my other songs,” says Fionn. “I felt like it was almost a gift from The Beatles or whatever wellspring they drew on. I remember being in Mallorca and thinking, ‘Were The Beatles ever here?’ Not that I’m saying it’s on their level but it has some sort of cosmic flow to it.”
That flow leads to Valencia for the luminous “Teix Mountain”, which evokes the off-piste mountain spirit of its title and the album as a whole. Its rarefied sense of romanticism also extends to the title track, where Fionn’s long-standing friend Anna Friel provides subtle, beautiful backing vocals for an almost hallucinatory hymn to companionship. Braided with haunting references to storms and “summer ghosts”, it’s a song lit with inner faith, breaking out in the declaration, “I believe there’s a light that brings good souls together.” “A lot of my writing has a kind of abstract-expressionistic way of falling together and assembling itself,” says Fionn, “but I also love it when something is simple and timeless – where it just bursts into something else.”
Good souls duly unite beneath a stormy and star-lit sky in the gorgeous reverie of “Blood Is Thicker Than Wine”, a song bursting with impressionistic detail. “That song has an instant visual thing about it to me,” says Fionn, a description borne out by lyrics of such evocative power, you can picture the scene immediately: two lovers under the moon, laughing and lit by lightning. “Anja II” unspools with a similar scene-setting clarity, telling a story in increments – “Scene change/Spotlights on” – and providing an epic shift for the record’s sure sense of structure.
From here, O Avalanche moves from a sense of loved-up drift to a state of serene, unforced resolve. “Written in a dream,” says Fionn, “Farewell” is a tenderly up-tempo take on partings, sorrowed yet beautifully becalmed in its looping arrangement. “Into the Light of the Sun” has a feeling of resolution about it, unfurling “like a burst of energy,” says Fionn. “Headphones” is a near-hymnal beauty, Regan’s beatific vocals referencing fleeting moments half-remembered over mellifluous ripples of glinting guitar. The album’s rhyming motifs of oceans, sunlight, waves, tsunamis and names written on skin seem to coalesce here, like snapshots stored for reminiscence. Finally, closer “Deià Song/Llucalcari” resembles a soft, supple awakening from a dream of summer, eyes wide open in readiness for new horizons.
“I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it,” says Fionn. It took him two or three albums’ worth of material to find the songs that felt simpatico – the ones that “started to hang out together and fought their way to becoming the album”. Capturing the mood, Fionn wrote the record while staying in Majorca, a place he describes as his “true north”: “There’s a sense of an artistic energy there, where you step back a little from the main drag of bigger cities. You’re sat there in the mountains looking towards the cities, rather than the other way. There’s a kind of focus, a feeling that you’re tuned in to something.”
Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut, 2006’s acclaimed 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. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s “The Meetings of the Waters”, while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Mercury, 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 Fionn.
Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. “It’s like you’re looking into this world where there’s a depth of field, it’s summer, and you’re floating into and out of it,” he says of the album. “The songs can come together in the moment, so it’s not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there’s an eternal optimism about it – a kind of upward-feeling energy.” With the gentlest of touches, O Avalanche will sweep you off your feet.
