Maria Somerville’s Luster is a love letter to people and place

Inspired by her return to Connemara, a region rich in Irish history and myth, Maria Somerville’s second album is shaped its spirit, spacious landscape and seasonal pace.

The weather in Dublin this late January is mild, nothing like the images of Storm Éowyn being beamed from the rest of Ireland. It is later described by national broadcaster RTÉ as “one of the most devastating storms ever to hit the country”.

Previous days had seen woodlands redrawn; roads became clogged with fallen debris. Over a pleasant afternoon tea in a comfortable café-bar at the centre of the capital city, Maria Somerville considers the carnage unleashed in her native Connemara, a more preserved rural region in the west of Ireland. Even as we speak, her parents are enduring a loss of electricity, water and heat, with some vital utilities expected to remain off for several more days.

“They thought the roof was going to come off,” Somerville tells me between sips from the kind of impractically small cup favoured by the more cosmopolitan coffee bar.

Having left to attend college in Dublin, Somerville moved back to Connemara four years ago, where she recorded her new album, Luster. Directly inspired by the region, the project acts as a reaction and counterpoint to her first full-length, All My People (2019), which she felt captured a yearning in her soul for home. New song Corrib, for example, is named after the lake the singer-guitarist grew up near and serves, she says, as a “love letter to the place”.

“When you’re away from somewhere – or maybe Ireland in general, the postcard Ireland that you see, the kind of idealism – it’s nice to [return]. The romanticism that can happen, wherever you are, it’s very complex. It’s not just one thing, but being there really influenced the shape of the album in a way that I didn’t expect.”

She continues: “The landscape, I suppose, inspired some of the spaciousness in the arrangements and the textures, and maybe the pace – different paces through different seasons. I guess Luster, the title, comes from that as well – reflections of the light I was seeing.”

Lough Corrib sits at the heart of the Gaeltacht, a scene so beloved by William Wilde, father of Oscar, that he wrote a book titled Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands. The elder Wilde even built a summerhouse on the banks of the lake, called Moytura House, a structure that still stands.

Connemara is also where much of 1950s Hollywood movie The Quiet Man was shot, its craggy landscapes allowing director John Ford to present an antiquated – maybe even offensive – vision of Irish life and people. The presentation of any art said to be inspired by the area invites audiences to choose their own cliché. But Somerville’s music is an antidote to trite Irish stereotypes. The rugged terrain has influenced her soulful take on post-punk, built out of austere guitar strums, ambient atmospherics and understated vocals that feel as if they could get lost in the breeze.

Then there is a song like Garden, with its surging dream-pop arrangement cradled by driving drums and chugging bassline. My Bloody Valentine are an obvious precursor, and it’s easy to envision one of Somerville’s misty numbers appearing in a Sofia Coppola movie (she says she’s a fan of the filmmaker).

Some tracks even qualify as baroque, evoking bands like Broken Social Scene: see Stonefly, which features guitar playing from Somerville’s fellow Connemara native, Olan Monk. Yet, if you search for the Irish mythos, you’ll be able to find it. Though the lyrics of the atmospheric, drumless Halo are practically indecipherable, they embody the sense of tradition and allure that many associate with Connemara: “I was lying there/ Thee wild, wild heroes of the land/ Mystical creatures lie/ Of Eirne/ I’m coming back.”

Somerville was also inspired by the community she grew up in but felt she didn’t fully understand until her return. She talks of the “lost knowledge” she’s attempting to learn through the people, one of whom is her father, a retired fisherman who spent years captaining a small boat on the lake. Such is her dad’s connection to nature, Somerville claims he can predict the weather from something as unscientific as the direction of the wind, or the way the sun hits the rocks.

Family has had a more direct influence on her music. Growing up, it was Somerville’s brother who first taught her how to play guitar. And within the crucial amphitheatres of local pubs, she’d witness her father and uncle sing the great Irish ballads. The effect on her was profound.

“He [Somerville’s uncle] had this tremble on his voice that was crazy,” she enthuses. “Him and my dad and my other uncles used to sing these kinds of blood harmonies that they learned in school. I don’t know how they learned them, but it was great. That got me into singing, so I was always singing unaccompanied. And I found that really kind of cathartic.

“I sang my way through things, whether it was hard times or happy times. And that’s kind of what I feel. With the voice, no one can take it from me.”

The songs on Luster (out on 4AD; her first album was self-released) were demoed in a living room setup, a process Somerville is very comfortable with, having studied music engineering. “I can get things to a certain place,” she says. “It’s something I want to get better at.” The final mix was completed in New York by producer/engineer Gabriel Schuman, best known for his work with rappers such as Azealia Banks, MIKE and Bladee.

From the bedrock of these recordings, collaboration bloomed. Some work on Luster was completed mostly in her home studio in Connemara. There were also some fruitful weeks spent working in a friend’s home in Leenaun, north Connemara, where Somerville invited various like-minded figures from the Irish music scene to collaborate. As well as Monk, she was joined by Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald (who releases music under the name Nashpaints). Both are acknowledged for making vital contributions in pulling the album together.

More musicians were recruited to bring different instruments to the sessions, such as harpist Róisín Berkeley on the short intro track Réalt, and violinist Margie Jean Lewis on Flutter. Most notably, Lankum’s Ian Lynch brings the drone of his uilleann pipes on Violet. I had to go back and listen closely to detect these contributions, as each is very subtle, slipping into the arrangements like elegant hands into velvet gloves. Luster encapsulates the current innovations of like-minded young musicians seeking to strike a balance between the traditional and the forward-thinking, and Somerville’s position at the centre of this movement (press notes for the album reveal Somerville is also a contributor to Princ€ss, a previously anonymous experimental “supergroup” on the label wherethetimegoes).

“The process definitely changed,” Somerville says, comparing the recording of her two albums. “I worked with a lot more people on this one and went through different stages with the process. Some of the people that worked on it were remote. And then I had friends come out to record a lot. I like that we didn’t have any constraints with studio time because you get to follow ideas in a more holistic way, but maybe there is a positive in going in to record and just getting it done,” she laughs. “Those kinds of experiences were nice because on the last album, it was a lot more insular; it was less collaborative. I just liked hearing the harp and the other [instruments] on their own.”

The rest of the year will see Somerville extensively tour the record, bringing it out from the close-to-home process of its creation to different audiences. Though she’s particular in the studio, Somerville also enjoys the chaos of playing live. Past travels have seen her perform solo in support of Dry Cleaning.

“I love playing live,” she says. “It’s so nice when you play and there’s that kind of experience that can never happen again. Each time you play is different and intimate. And you can kind of make new ways of playing the songs, and they take on kind of new meanings. Playing with people is great as well. I really love it. It’s a huge joy.”

Luster might be hitting at an opportune time. Though achieved in a less direct fashion than Lankum’s more tradition-infused music, it’s an edgy, cliché-snapping take on Irish sounds and Irish myths. Still, Somerville keeps circling back to those childhood visits to the pub, where her father and uncle bellowed their songs. We both have similar memories – I recall the large bottles of red lemonade (a distinctly Irish soft drink) kids were expected to make do with as they played around adults enjoying their pints and their songs.

“Yeah, they were all great, the big singing voices,” says Somerville, wistfully. “It’s not like I’m really belting it out [on Luster] either. It might be something I go to for the next record.”