Lankum vocalist Radie Peat has shared her debut solo single ‘Still I Love Him’ – check it out below.
READ MORE: Lankum: “This generation of Irish artists have a confidence to stand up and be themselves”
The track, released via Rough Trade Records, is Peat’s interpretation of the traditional love song of the same name, reworked with close friend and musical companion John Francis Flynn.
Flynn discovered the rare version of the song in the Irish Traditional Music Archives before writing a melody to accompany it. He then shared it with Peat, who built it out with an intricate vocal arrangement, harmonies and subtle tonal contrasts.
“I like indirect,” Peat has said of the track. “I don’t like being too explicit and I wanted the freedom to make decisions around my voice without having to explain myself.”
Check it out here:
Peat added: “John discovered the song in an archive titled ‘True Love’, I found that so dark – even though you suffer – because of the amount you love someone – you stay, you carry on.”
She continued: “I was trying to show the two sides of the coin here, I was trying to get across the two extremes that can exist when we are experiencing love.”
Across the song, Peat said she sought to represent the male figure’s “escalating bad behaviour with minor chords and sombre tones”, before allowing the chorus to open up into something more romantic and expansive.
“There has to be great love to go through that suffering,” she added. “I wanted the chorus brimming and gushing with romance represented in the vocals and instrumentally with the strings.”
Peat has also announced a small run of live dates in the UK, Ireland and Europe. A pre-sale will begin on Thursday (July 9) at 10am, before general sale starts on Friday (July 10) at 10am. Find tickets here.
Radie Peat will play:
NOVEMBER
3 – London, UK – Union Chapel
20 – Dublin, Ireland – Vicar Street
JANUARY 2027
31 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Paradiso
Peat is best known as one of the four members of Lankum, whose Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello-nominated fourth studio album ‘False Lankum’ was released in 2023 to widespread acclaim.
Lankum followed it last year with the live album ‘Live In Dublin’, recorded across three sold-out nights at Dublin’s Vicar Street.
The band have also recently found their music reaching new audiences on screen, with ‘Katie Cruel’ and ‘The Granite Gaze’ appearing in Netflix’s House Of Guinness, and ‘Hunting The Wren’ soundtracking the final scene of the recent Peaky Blinders film The Immortal Man.
Last year, Lankum also shared a haunting cover of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’, originally created for Oona Doherty’s dance show ‘Specky Clark’.
The post Lankum’s Radie Peat weighs up “two extremes” of relationship on haunting debut solo single, ‘Still I Love Him’ appeared first on NME.
