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4. The Pogues: “Dirty Old Town”
Though the Pogues were technically from London, they carried the torch of Celtic punk so proudly that I’m not going to gatekeep and say they’re not an Irish band. (Shane MacGowan lived in Ireland as a child, anyway, and wrote many of his best songs about Irish emigrants.) The Pogues recorded this Irish classic — written in 1949 by Ewan MacColl and made famous in the early 1960s by the folk revival group the Dubliners — for the 1985 album “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” and it became one of the band’s signature songs. MacGowan’s vocal is at once sour and sweet, a perfect balance for a song about a love-hate relationship with your hometown.
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5. Fontaines D.C.: “Jackie Down the Line”
The Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. had a breakout year in 2024, thanks to its acclaimed album “Romance.” This moody tune from the 2022 release “Skinty Fia” can be interpreted as a poetic meditation on the relationship between Ireland and England. “The more I listen to it, the more it’s about Irishness surviving in England,” the frontman Grian Chatten once told Steve Lamacq of the BBC. “Or not even just Irishness in England but it’s about a cultural identity, or some kind of identity, surviving in another place.”
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6. The Cranberries: “Zombie”
Rumbling and primal, the hardest rocking hit by the Cranberries (a group formed in Limerick) was inspired by two I.R.A. bombings in Warrington, England, that killed two children in 1993. The Cranberries had previously been known for the softer sound heard on singles like “Linger” and “Dreams,” but the vocalist and songwriter Dolores O’Riordan insisted that this one required something else. “She was adamant how she wanted more distortion pedals on the guitars and for me to hit the drums harder than usual,” the group’s drummer Fergal Lawler once recalled. “But she was absolutely right, because ‘Zombie’ was such an angry song.” In 2019, a year after O’Riordan’s death, the “Zombie” music video became the first by an Irish band to hit one billion views on YouTube.
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7. Kneecap: “Sick in the Head”
Kneecap is a hip-hop trio that makes incendiary and sometimes humorous music that reflects the experiences of the post-Troubles generation in Northern Ireland. Last year, its three members starred alongside Michael Fassbender in a wildly entertaining (and only semi-fictionalized) biopic that dramatized Kneecap’s rise to fame (or perhaps more accurately, infamy). This track from the 2024 album “Fine Art” is indicative of the group’s sound, which blends English- and Irish-language lyrics — a provocation in a time when the Irish language has been declared “endangered.”
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8. The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem: “Finnegan’s Wake”
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem emigrated from Ireland to the United States after World War II and eventually became key figures in the Greenwich Village folk scene, usually appearing clad in their Aran jumpers. (Bob Dylan was a huge fan.) The Clancy Brothers and Makem were known for their spirited arrangements of traditional Irish tunes, like this classic, darkly comic ballad about the resurrection of Tim Finnegan — a story that also inspired James Joyce.
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9. Enya: “The Celts”
This ethereal early composition by Enya — Ireland’s best-selling solo artist of all time — served as the theme song to the popular 1987 BBC documentary series “The Celts: Rich Traditions and Ancient Myths.” That same year, it also appeared on Enya’s self-titled debut solo album, which was reissued in 1992 and retitled “The Celts” following the commercial success of her next two releases.
