Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 8:00 PM
Lodge Room, Los Angeles
By the time Irish musician Maria Somerville started writing Luster, her landmark label debut for 4AD, she had lived away from her native Connemara for quite some time. Having grown up amongst the wild, mountainous terrain of Galway’s rural west coast, she later relocated to Dublin, where she patiently developed an atmospheric dream pop signature inspired by the landscape of her youth – a spellbinding soundworld of gusting ambient electronics, ethereal guitar strums, sparse percussion, and hushed lyrical vignettes. In 2019, this culminated in All My People, a self-released LP steeped in reverb, nostalgia and a yearning for home. Partly influenced by the traditional Irish folk ballads her father and uncles would sing at local pub sessions when she was a child, the album garnered praise from The Guardian, Resident Advisor, Bandcamp Daily, Clash, District and The Thin Air, and saw Somerville play extensive live shows around the island and abroad, both solo and alongside a band comprising members of Dublin’s DIY music scene. After a sold out performance in London’s Cafe OTO, a pause in momentum led her back to Connemara once more, where she settled into a house near where she was raised, overlooking one of the country’s largest lakes, Lough Corrib. Invigorated by her surroundings, Somerville found a renewed sense of creative energy upon returning to home soil. After setting up a simple living room studio, work commenced on the songs that would eventually become Luster, an album that illuminates her music anew, pushing it forward in both sound and spirit. Where All My People conveyed memories and melancholic longing with misty slowcore balladry, this project finds Somerville more assured in the path her life has taken, and the person she’s become in the process. As she sings in ‘Trip’ – “I can see more clearly than I could before. I know now what's true for me.” This feeling revealed itself gradually as Somerville settled into her new routine. Long walks up the boreen from her house, where wild strawberries grew and goats roamed freely, led her down ancestral paths, where she relished in quiet observations of the landscape around her. Conversations with her father, a fisherman, sharpened her awareness of the weather’s subtle rhythms and shifting patterns in the environment – she learned about his ways of reading directions of the wind, the movements of birds, and the distinctive ringing of electric lines. Perhaps inevitably, reconnecting with the land in this way provided “fertile ground” for Somerville’s free-flowing recording sessions at home, and during two artist residencies on the island of Inis Oírr off the coast of Galway – its impact on the music feels more intrinsic than overt, a natural byproduct of immersion and the creative headspace it placed her in. As she worked on demos and drafts – aided by skills she’d acquired in the music degree and sound engineering course she completed some years back – she simultaneously made field recordings of her surroundings. While these were mostly siphoned off for a separate project, some snatches of environmental audio do linger in Luster’s fabric, like in the blissful instrumental opener ‘Réalt’ – meaning ‘Stars’ in Irish – and the ambient folk closer ‘October Moon’, in which shoreline surf mingles with Somerville’s reverberant guitar and heavenly vocals. The landscape’s influence fed into Somerville’s lyrics too, resonating in the images she conjures throughout Luster, a title derived from the way light would reflect off the rocks near her house whenever rain was coming. You can hear it in ‘Garden’, one of the album’s driving shoegaze high points – co-produced by Diego Herrera, aka Suzanne Kraft – in which she sings of the “passage of time” and “swimming through and out of the cave, reaching the darkest corners of my soul” before reaching warmer waters. Although the songs on Luster are intimate expressions of an internal world, Somerville’s creative life since returning to Connemara has been far from isolated. Collaborators who visited her on her home turf during the writing process included J. Colleran and Brendan Jenkinson, the latter of whom also played a key role in the production All My People. In Leenaun, north Connemara, Somerville was joined by Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald (aka Nashpaints), who helped “tie it all together” across multiple sessions — as they worked, they felt like they were being “hugged by the mountains”, she says. Somerville also connected with nearby musicians like the Mayo-based harpist Roisin Berkley (who features on ‘Réalt’) and Olan Monk (who lends fuzzed-out guitar playing to ‘Stonefly’), enshrining the companionship they’ve shared since Somerville returned to Connemara. Meanwhile, Lankum’s Ian Lynch contributes uilleann pipe drones to ‘Violet’, while Margie Jean Lewis adds reverberant violin bows to the ambient haze of ‘Flutter’. It’s a collaborative spirit that’s been reflected in Somerville’s contributions to other projects too, including the 2024 underground hit Princ€ss, released on cult Dublin label wherethetimegoes. Mixed by the renowned engineer and producer Gabriel Schuman in New York, some songs on the album do appear unaccompanied, and are largely unchanged from Somerville’s earliest demos. ‘Halo’ is an ambient hymn to the land and the sense of inner peace and protection it has given her since coming home. In ‘Corrib’, strummed chords and choral ambience underscores Somerville’s featherlight vocals – a love letter to a place you carry with you, even when you are far away. “Even in the darkest hours I still appreciate you. I know I’m not alone.” Listeners have had a window into Somerville’s world every Monday and Tuesday morning since 2021 via her beloved Early Bird Show on NTS Radio, where her dawn chorus selections range from blissful ambient and dream pop to traditional Irish folk songs. Since signing to 4AD in 2021, she has toured with her label mates Dry Cleaning, and released two covers as part of the label’s 40th anniversary celebrations – taking on Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Kinky Love’ and Air Miami’s ‘Sea Bird’. With the release of ‘Projections’ in late 2024 – the gorgeous shoegaze pop slow-burn that introduces us to Luster – she signalled the arrival of a new era that will see her play around the world this year, accompanied by a live band. Rest assured though, no matter where Somerville goes, she’ll take a piece of home with her – a living, breathing, timeless essence you can sense in every note, as clear as the air by the Corrib.