Kingfishr say their approach to being a band can be summed up by the words in the chorus of their woozy, stirring ballad “Shot in the Dark”: “If it all falls apart/At least we enjoyed it.” “There’s something cathartic about that phrase,” vocalist and guitarist Eddie Keogh tells Apple Music. “The likelihood of a band taking off and becoming something that you can make a living off is so incredibly slim. For the moment, we seem to be able to keep ourselves afloat, which is obviously the dream.” The sense of a group seizing their moment runs right through Halcyon, an album that elegantly sways from rousing indie-rock sing-alongs to expansive ballads to contemplative Celtic folk, and it all comes back to how the Irish trio came to be doing this in the first place. “The nucleus of the band formed around the fact that we studied engineering in the west of Ireland and that was our plan in life, and that was where we were headed,” Keogh continues. “Then over lockdown, we got cold feet about entering the real world and we were like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll try and write some music here,’ and it all started to happen almost accidentally.” Halcyon is a document of Kingfishr’s first few years—a period in which their fanbase has rapidly expanded and they have become the latest Irish stars on the cusp of a big breakthrough—its songs ranging from some of their earliest compositions to tracks written during its recording. “Ultimately, we’re just three lads giving it a whack,” states Keogh. “I don’t think music has to be anything more than that.” Halcyon is the sound of Kingfishr riding that wave, one that thrillingly recaptures the euphoria of their live shows. Keogh and bandmates Eoghan “McGoo” McGrath (banjo) and Eoin “Fitz” Fitzgibbon guide us through it, track by track. “Man on the Moon” Eddie Keogh: “There was a period of time there where I was really fucking struggling with the whole people telling me what the craic was. You start off as a musician, as an artist, with this idea that it’s pure and who gives a fuck about the man or any of this stuff. ‘Man on the Moon’ was about losing myself somehow and the potential of what it could be—the big lights, the big stars in your eyes, that kind of thing. The idea of putting a bullet in the man on the moon is essentially killing the thing that made you want to make music in the first place and then having that moment of clarity and being like, ‘Fucking hell. What the fuck are we doing here, boys?’ and finding your way back to just the three of us, playing tunes for the love of it and having a good time, and bringing people on board that also just want to have fun.” “21” EK: “This is one of the tracks that was written during the recording of the album. We were staying in an Airbnb in Dublin, recording in a place called The Clinic. We’d just signed with an American label, Atlantic, and all the stuff was going on in LA with the fires, and I guess that story was floating around in our heads. We went home and Fitz came up with a riff.” Eoin Fitzgibbon: “Without even thinking about it, it started falling out of us, in some sort of a flow state.” EK: “That’s always the most fun, when you’re flying through it and it’s all coming at you.” “Gloria” EK: “‘Gloria’ was about 12 months before the album recording. It was written during a pretty tumultuous time in the band. The industry has a reputation of being this kind of monster and it can be that if you’re not very sure of yourself and you don’t have a good frame around you and a good support group. We signed up to the label, people who wanted the best and still do want the best for us, but ultimately, the junction between commerce and art is very dangerous waters. ‘Gloria’ is about sacrificing pieces of yourself artistically for the sake of wanting to be a big artist and wanting to be successful. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, to want to be a big band or whatever, but that’s what the song is about. It’s having to make those decisions and then deciding when enough is enough, and when you have to maintain artistic integrity.” “I Cried, I Wept” EK: “This is about the same thing. We’re in a very different space now, in terms of our currency in certain conversations. I think that both sides, from the label’s perspective, they’ve definitely proven a couple of points to us that I don’t think we were too happy about. But it’s like, ‘You were right on this point eventually.’ We both learned a lot about each other. Working relationships are like that. But ‘I Cried, I Wept’ is the same thing, giving pieces of yourself up to making certain decisions.” “Next to Me” EK: “‘Next to Me’ is about the girlfriend. I have a lovely girlfriend on the go, and it won me a lot of brownie points in the relationship, as you can imagine. It was funny. We were recording ‘Killeagh’ and we went away for a weekend, took a couple days off and came back into the recording session up in Dublin…” EF: “The three of us were in the live room and I went, ‘Anything happen over the weekend?’ and the both of them turned to me and were like, ‘We have girlfriends now.’” EK: “There was no big plan between myself and McGoo. Fitz has been going out with his girlfriend for a couple of years now but myself and McGoo both got girlfriends the same weekend.” EF: “They’re changed men.” EK: “Changed for the better.” “Diamonds & Roses” EK: “This is an ode to the death of celebrity. Gone are the days of the ivory towers. I think characters like Prince or Michael Jackson, these larger-than-life figures, I’m not sure they could exist today. Maybe The Weeknd is a little bit of an outlier there. But during the writing, we were talking about it and Lewis Capaldi really broke the ceiling for me on who could be a pop star at that level. It was such a refreshing take on that side of popular culture. He’s a lad who’s very classically Scottish and just wants to drink pints and get stuck in. I was thinking about that, and the song was essentially about what it means to try to garner some public attention in the digital age, and how everything is kind of on its head, and maybe that’s what art is all about.” “Flowers-Fire” EK: “This was the first song we released. It was written in a couple of parts when we were still in university and we were living together. It’s about a relationship I was in years ago that was pretty topsy-turvy. It was my first proper relationship, but it’s about maybe having regrets about how it ended. You know when you’re 17, 18 and you have no idea how to talk to girls, even if you’re in a relationship with one. You don’t understand them at all, and then you end up making absolute bags of it, and then you’re just stood around, being like, ‘Ah shite, I made a fucking tit of myself here.’” “Caroline (rework)” EK: “This has a bit of a reference to the Seamus Heaney poem Mid-Term Break. He comes home from school and his brother’s died and he talks about coming into the wake and seeing him. The second verse of ‘Caroline’ was directly inspired by that. We wrote it in the room but didn’t know what it was because it didn’t fit the metric of a lot of the other songs that we had. We played it for a friend of mine, kind of absentmindedly, and he was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ From there, we were like, ‘Oh, maybe it might be a good idea to explore this side of things.’ ‘Caroline’ really gave us the width, creatively, to do ‘Shot in the Dark’ and then ‘Killeagh,’ as well, spawned from that. ‘Caroline’ is probably the crux of the album, as it pertains to us spreading our wings creatively.” “Killeagh” EF: “I played hurling in Killeagh for 20 years, it was my whole world until I started music and realized there was more to life. A friend of mine asked if we’d write a song for the hurling club because a lot of other clubs around Ireland have songs to sing when they win a final, but we didn’t have any. I begrudgingly agreed that if they got into the final, we’d throw something together, and they did. We threw this thing together in 15 to 20 minutes, recorded a quick video, sent it to a couple of people on WhatsApp, and then threw it up on TikTok. It spread around quite quickly on WhatsApp, but we didn’t think we’d ever release it. It was kind of half a joke. It wasn’t until Patrick’s Day this year that it really took legs. I guess people respond to the community element about it. It reminds people that they belong to some sort of community, or how important that could be. It’s really taken on a life of its own from where it came from, a drunken bet I made. It’s been number one in Ireland for weeks.” “Ways to Change” Eoghan McGrath: “This came from a progression I was working on in the studio and, like a lot of our songs, you seize it and it takes off from there.” EK: “It’s funny, early on, I would refer to ‘Flowers-Fire’ as being a pop-punk song, and I know that sounds a bit fucking mad, but I feel like ‘Ways to Change’ is a similar thing. You could do the old Midwest emo voice to it and it would make sense.” “Shadow” EK: “I’d had some experiences at a Viking village with a group of my friends—which we won’t go into—and you know, there were some shadows. Carl Jung talked about shadow and integrating your personality and that part of becoming an adult or a fully formed, mature person, is dealing with the parts of yourself that you don’t want to believe exist. Nobody wants to think they’re a bad person, but we’re all pretty bad eggs deep down if we get the chance. Coming to terms with that and making sure that you know that you can be a terrible person, or keeping that in check, is important. ‘Shadow’ is a song about my personal experience with that.” “Blue Skies” EK: “This is about a girl I was friends with who took her own life in Spain a couple of years ago. It came out of the blue. I was quite close with her, but a lot of my friends would’ve been way closer, and it affected us all pretty deeply, because we had just left college, everyone was spreading their wings with all this excitement around it, and then this thing happened and it put a bump in the road. You think about the memories you had, that you associate with that person, and you look at them in a different light. We all thought everyone was having a good time, but obviously there were undercurrents there. ‘Blue Skies’ is a memory of that.” “Shot in the Dark” EK: “When we met the label, we were flown to England and we came back, we’re all exhausted, and we were talking about how essentially, we’d be back in jobs in six months. We were like, ‘Look, we’ll give it a whack. It’ll be great story for the grandkids.’ We were talking and I had a guitar in my hand, and we just started playing along and this song fell out of the conversation, essentially. Like, who really gives a shit? You’re only here for a very short time. You might as well try the things that you want to try. Even if they go wrong, at least you’ll know.” “Eyes Don’t Lie” EF: “This was the first thing we wrote. Back when myself and Eddie were living in the same house and McGoo was just down the road. I’d left my guitar on the bed with this really weird tuning. Then Eddie walked in and started doing something without really knowing that he was in a different tuning and it ended up being the picking pattern for the start of ‘Eyes Don’t Lie.’ From there, we wrote the thing. We thought it was crap, as we’d thought everything we’d written previously to that was crap. Then we started playing this one for a couple of friends and their first response was, ‘You didn’t write that, it’s definitely a cover.’ That was the first time we were like, ‘Oh, this is something.’ This song is quite an important one for us as a band.” “Someday” EK: “This is a little bit idealistic, like an ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon situation, to believe that someday we’ll all get on. The sentiment is a bit Utopian and it’s not meant as a literal thing. It’s just pretty hopeful in the sentiment because a lot of our songs are very fucking sad. It’s nice to have a bit of a silver lining somewhere!” “Schooldays” EK: “This is about how part of me believed I was going to peak in college because I ended up being a bit of a Van Wilder character who just drank and drank and drank, and dropped out of college and came back and they went, ‘Ooh, don’t you want to leave the college lifestyle someday?’ It’s a reflection on the boys that gave me a hard time in school. It’s also a reflection on me, maybe in college. I think it’s probably the most expansive idea, lyrically.”