Sorcha Richardson

With Draw The Outline, Sorcha Richardson leans into softness, abstraction and quiet revelation. Written largely from a small bedroom in West Kerry, after a period of heavy touring and the looming edges of burnout, the album marks a shift away from the sharper narrative focus of her earlier work towards something more fluid, dream-like and interior.

Originally from Dublin, Richardson spent nearly a decade in New York before returning to Ireland, eventually moving west to a place shaped by stillness: at the foot of a mountain, a short walk from the sea. That landscape seeps into the album’s atmosphere. These are songs that move at a gentler pace, finding emotional intensity in unassuming moments: August sunlight, car journeys, icy roads, orange moons, awkward encounters and the strange loneliness of being misunderstood.

Across tracks like “Sea Pink Moon,” “Grenadine,” “Illinois Again,” “Dog’s Best Man” and “Adam (Pacing in the Park),” Richardson explores intimacy, perception, vulnerability and self-protection with empathy, dry humour and a finely tuned eye for detail. Relationships here rarely collapse dramatically; instead, they shift through small negotiations, misread signals and quiet reckonings.

Musically, Draw The Outline moves away from the synthesizer-led textures of her previous records, finding a new intimacy in acoustic guitar, woodwinds, saxophone, Hammond organ and piano. Influenced by artists such as Feist and Aldous Harding, the production feels close, warm and textural, like a magnifying glass held over a vast, hazy landscape.

The result is Richardson’s most open-ended and quietly confident record to date: an album about uncertainty, empathy and the strange clarity that can come from not needing to define everything too tightly. As Richardson puts it, Draw The Outline is “an instruction to start without needing to know where you're going.”