Ireland’s most exciting young artist, Sorcha Richardson, is releasing the second single from her eagerly awaited sophomore album ‘Shark Eyes’ and is also announcing her new album ‘Smiling Like An Idiot’
About her new song ‘Shark Eyes’ Richardson says “Shark Eyes is about being totally infatuated with someone who you know isn’t as interested in you as you are in them.
It’s about following your darker and more destructive impulses and allowing yourself to be taken for a bit of a ride, partly out of boredom and curiosity, but also partly out of a lingering hope that maybe this time it will end differently.
I think I wrote it as a way of admitting to myself that that relationship would never be anything more than it already was, but I wanted it to still have the sweetness of a love song.
Sometimes there’s a real lightness and relief in coming to that realisation about someone and knowing and accepting the limits of your relationship with them.
It was the first song I wrote for this album and the first thing that Alex and I worked on together since we made my debut album First Prize Bravery.
I think it acted as a bit of a green light to keep going.”
Sorcha Richardson’s debut album ‘First Prize Bravery’ was the culmination of her experiences throughout young adulthood, a time during which she ventured from home in Dublin to New York, Los Angeles and then back again.
Greeted by critical acclaim from Nylon, The Irish Times, DIY and more, comparisons were made with Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers et al, leading to a nomination for the Choice Music Prize.
She toured the UK and Ireland, hit a few festivals and then… well, we all know what threw a spanner in the works.
Two years on, and she seems to have made peace with her misfortune – especially as she has friends who never got to fully tour their releases which emerged at a similar time.
“In some ways I feel lucky that we at least got one lap around the track,” she evaluates, noting that her subsequent Irish headline tour was rescheduled so many times that the exact number has been lost to history.
“It felt like it killed some of the momentum I had drummed up.
But it also meant that I had all the time in the world to make my second record.”
Instead, she moved into her late grandparents’ house, turned the living room into an impromptu if elementary studio, and delved into the “static process” of working alone, and then a month-long love/hate process of almost daily sessions via Zoom.
