It’s been a remarkable year for Irish songwriter Lisa O’Neill. Her acclaimed new album All of This Is Chance arrived on Rough Trade Records in February and is now ranking highly on many critics 2023’s Albums of The Year Lists. Lisa recently finished her 2023 touring with a sold out show at Vicar Street in Dublin, she also performed an emotional rendition of Fairytale Of New York with Glen Hansard and members of The Pogues and The Dubliners at Shane MacGowan’s funeral in Co Tipperary, watch here.

Amongst the wealth of praise for All Of This Is Chance, Gideon Coe at BBC 6 Music picked it as his Album Of The Year. It was No. 3 in Mojo Magazine’s Folk Albums Of The Year, and No.24 in their main Albums Of The Year List. Bob Boilen at NPR deemed it his No.3 Album of The Year and it was one of Songlines’ Top 10 Albums Of The Year and Uncut Magazine’s No.17 Album Of The Year and at No. 33 with The Quietus. On top of all that, last week the actors Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy both spoke of their love of her music in a radio interview. Lisa will begin 2024 on tour in Australia and New Zealand, a year which also sees her take on the prestigious role of a Fellow of The Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast.

A raconteur in the truest sense of the word, O’Neill is a five time BBC Folk Award nominee and her previous album Heard a Long Gone Song was named The Guardian’s 2019 Folk Album of the Year. Her adaptation of Bob Dylan’s All the Tired Horses soundtracked the final scene of epic TV drama Peaky Blinders. All of This Is Chance features orchestral masterpieces such as the ambitious and cinematic Old Note, and the title track which was inspired by the Monaghan writer Patrick Kavanagh's epic poem, The Great Hunger, as well as stirring contemplations on nature, birds, berries, bees, and blood ring out over a clacking banjo throughout the album, dusting and devastating all those in its wake.

All Of This Is Chance takes O’Neill’s inimitable voice to greater heights, or depths, depending on which way you look at it. Throughout all eight songs on this album, it feels like she is writing in a constant state of wonderment. Not only a portrait of the artist in love with nature, but one perplexed by the ever-expanding gulf between it and modern society. O’Neill sings across that divide while simultaneously digging deep into the land, eyes transfixed on a universe of colorful birds, and beyond them stargazing into the atomized constellations of outer space of which we ourselves are fragments.

Watch Lisa’s magical NPR Tiny Desk Concert performance here. “The music is stark and cerebral, the voice is singular and personal with few flourishes, and I find it captivating,” said NPR Music’s Bob Boilen. Lisa performed three songs from her new record (‘Silver Seed’, ‘Old Note’ and ‘Goodnight World’) as well as a new track, ‘When cash was King’, which she calls a ‘trutheen’ - a little truth - and not a fully fledged song, about her recent experience trying to buy a coffee with cash in London. “It dawned on me that if a person is without a bank account or a mobile phone in the large cities today then they are at a huge disadvantage and sometimes unable to purchase basic essentials like food or water.”

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