When: 7.30pm on Saturda 8 March 2025
Where: Hallé at St Michael’s, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5DG

We’re excited to be working with Fionn Regan for the first time.

With November’s tour having long-since sold out, and his new album O Avalanche out 1 November via Nettwerk Music Group, Fionn Regan announces news of an epic UK and Ireland tour for February and March 2025.

Fionn Regan has shared the singles Islands, Headphones, Blood is Thicker Than Wine and Farewell from O Avalanche.

‘I float sometimes when you’re around,’ sings Regan on Islands, setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Mallorca, 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 its 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 Regan’s words, ‘very much on a level’ – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Regan 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.’

Rippling like the sea, Islands sets that magic-hour mood, using images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. That flow leads to Valencia for the luminous Teix Mountain, which evokes the off-piste mountain spirit of its title and the album as a whole. Its rarefied sense of romanticism also extends to the title track, where Regan’s long-standing friendAnna Friel provides beautifully delivered vocals for an almost hallucinatory hymn to companionship. Braided with haunting references to storms and ‘summer ghosts’, it’s a song lit with inner faith, breaking out in the declaration, ‘I believe there’s a light that brings good souls together’.

From here, O Avalanche moves from a sense of loved-up drift to a state of serene, unforced resolve. ‘Written in a dream,’ says Regan, Farewell is a tenderly up-tempo take on partings, sorrowed yet beautifully becalmed in its looping arrangement. Into the Light of the Sun has a feeling of resolution about it, unfurling ‘like a burst of energy,’ says Regan, while album closer Deià Song/Llucalcari resembles a soft, supple awakening from a dream of summer, eyes wide open in readiness for new horizons.

‘I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it,’ says Regan. 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, Regan wrote the record while staying in Mallorca, 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.’

Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury Prize-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty Dogwood Blossom drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s The Meeting Of The Waters while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. ‘I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,’ says Regan.

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.

This concert takes place in Hallé at St Michael’s – a former Roman Catholic church, which was founded in 1859 and became the heart of the Little Italy Community in Ancoats.

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Tickets go on sale at 10am on Friday 18 October via Seetickets.com

Attend on: Facebook