IDER

Tickets €20.50 (inc booking fee) from Ticketmaster.ie
Bookings Subject to 12.5% service charge per ticket (Max €10.50)

When IDER found themselves sleeping in a church in Barry, they knew this album would be different. The duo of Lily Somerville and Megan Markwick wound up in the Welsh seaside town after a chat with producer Dann Hume established they were on the same page: keen to swerve the breakneck pace of the music industry and immerse themselves in big projects. Hume had recently converted the building into a studio and invited the duo to visit towards the end of 2022. “We’d only met for half an hour over coffee, but we got our stuff together, drove five hours to a church and spent five days writing,” Somerville reflects, chuckling. Though they weren’t in “album mode” at the time, the trip would prove serendipitous. “The first songs came very instinctively,” adds Markwick. “I remember feeling: this is really speaking to what we want to say right now.”

The tracks that came out of that session would provide the sonic and thematic foundations for Late ToThe World – IDER’s third full-length album, and their most distinctive body of work to date. Since their formation in 2016, Somerville and Markwick have made a name for themselves delivering whip-smart emotional storytelling on a bed of folk harmonies and left-field pop. Their acclaimed 2019 debut Emotional Education set out their stall early as pop auteurs whose unflinching lyrics tap into uniquely female experiences of anxiety, identity and heartbreak. Building on those foundations, their 2021 follow-up shame embraces vulnerability and imperfection in its lyrics, while the instrumentation takes a more confident, dexterous and club-influenced turn.

Produced by Hume and recorded on residency in his church-cum-studio between summer and autumn 2023, Late To The World pushes IDER’s tender sound in a tougher direction. Taking an approach of ‘powerful minimalism’, it’s both bigger in scale and deliberately restrained, honing its contrasting textures of lush electronics and blistering indie rock. The result, they say, is the album they’ve “always wanted to make.”

“We had high ambitions for the sound of this record,” Markwick explains. “We talked a lot early on about how we wanted the production to be super intentional. Sometimes when you’re unsure, you shove everything in – you fill it up with every synth sound, every beat, every layer. But actually what feels more mature for us right now, and what mirrors the [album’s] messages, is stripping things back to the essentials. Everything has its purpose.