‘We’ve got to release the dead hand of the past’: how Ireland created the world’s best alternative music scene

O n a hot Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, while many are nursing halfway-point hangovers, the Dublin garage punk quartet Sprints whip up a jubilant mosh pit with their charged tune Descartes, Irish tricolour flags bobbing above them. As summer speeds on, at Japan’s Fuji rock festival, new songs from Galway indie act NewDad enrapture the crowd. Travy, a Nigerian-born and Tallaght-raised rapper, crafts a mixtape inflected with his Dublin lilt, the follow-up to the first Irish rap album to top the Irish charts. Efé transcends Dublin bedroom pop to get signed by US label Fader, and on Later … With Jools Holland, George Houston performs the haunting Lilith – a tribute to political protest singers everywhere – in a distinctive Donegal accent.

From Melbourne to Mexico City, concertgoers cont