Fionn Regan's 2024 album O Avalanche, available on vinyl for the first time. ""I float sometimes when you're around,"" sings Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan on ""Islands"", setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Spain, 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 it's 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 Fionn's words, ""very much on a level"" - shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Fionn 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."" ""I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it,"" says Fionn. 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, Fionn wrote the record while staying in Majorca, 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."" 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.
