Fionn Regan O Avalanche (White)

Fionn Regan's 2024 album O Avalanche, available on vinyl for the first time. "I float sometimes when you're around," sings Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan on "Islands", setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Spain, O Avalanche is an album of levitating intimacies, abstract and intuitive yet infused with a tangible sense of the elevating ties between environment and emotion. Between it's sun-dappled backdrops and lambent arrangements, the result is a set of sublime songs and something more: it's a record to float with, immersive, uplifting and transporting. His first since 2019's beautiful Cala, it's also an album that is, in Fionn's words, "very much on a level" - shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Fionn explains, "I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you're thinking about it in a visual way, there's a quality about it where it's always magic hour." "I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it," says Fionn. It took him two or three albums' worth of material to find the songs that felt simpatico - the ones that "started to hang out together and fought their way to becoming the album". Capturing the mood, Fionn wrote the record while staying in Majorca, a place he describes as his "true north": "There's a sense of an artistic energy there, where you step back a little from the main drag of bigger cities. You're sat there in the mountains looking towards the cities, rather than the other way. There's a kind of focus, a feeling that you're tuned in to something." Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan's off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. "It's like you're looking into this world where there's a depth of field, it's summer, and you're floating into and out of it," he says of the album. "The songs can come together in the moment, so it's not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there's an eternal optimism about it - a kind of upward-feeling energy." With the gentlest of touches, O Avalanche will sweep you off your feet.