Radie Peat: No Human Tongue Can Tell review – Glorious album from a voice that conveys vulnerability, anger and defiance all at once

No Human Tongue Can Tell

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Artist: Radie Peat

Label: Rough Trade Records

Radie Peat’s debut solo album is an Irish ghost story weighed down with centuries of accumulated trauma and lifted high by a voice that, even at its softest, bites like a cruel wind coming in off a lonely bog.

The Lankum singer has described the record as reflecting her wish to sound like a “dark Enya” – an effect she achieves stunningly on an LP that taps into the dread and pain that run like ley lines through much of traditional Irish folk.

Peat has worked on No Human Tongue Can Tell since 2021, a period during which Lankum have become the toast of critics in Britain (where they earned a Mercury Prize nomination) and the singer, from Artane in Dublin, has become a parent.

You can hear the care and caution she has invested in the project over that time on the album’s beautifully rendered opening track, Hares on the Mountain. The song is an unsettling ballad, made famous by Shirley Collins, that sketches out a nightmare scenario in which cocky young men are turned into animals and the women they have pursued so eagerly consider whether to hunt them for sport.

The tune is a lesson in the power of silence as Peat, working with the Lankum producer John “Spud” Murphy, strips away the music to bare instrumentation as a way of foregrounding a voice that constantly sounds as if it’s building towards one or other sort of catharsis.

That disquieting effect carries through to the album’s high point, in the form of the near-seven-minute The Moon and Stars. Here is a throbbing tour de force, breathtaking in its terrible beauty, as Peat’s keening vocals are paired with marching-band drums that morph into a trip-hop-style fade-out.

Dark Enya? It’s more like Björk crossing the Styx in a leaky rowing boat (in addition to calling back to Peat’s collaborations with Kneecap, in particular the early number 3Cag).

She travels deeper into the underworld on Willow Garden. Recounting the case of a man facing the gallows after murdering his lover, it grabs you by the guts and taps into the spirit of Lankum’s “mutant folk”. Her voice is then entirely absent from Luisne, with its overpowering onslaught of strings.

A hint of light pokes through the fog on Same Old Man. A spiralling guitar adds a hypnotic quality to Peat’s singing as she negotiates a composition made famous by Karen Dalton in 1971 but with a provenance that leads back into the mists of the Appalachian Mountains.

This is followed by a cameo from Katie Kim, her collaborator in the trio Øxn, on a grippingly gauzy take on Still I Love Him in which a woman laments her devotion to a neglectful husband.

Almost all of the songs on the album are traditional numbers. Peat has said that she was drawn to material in which “women have agency” rather than just being the “object of desire”. But, as with Lankum, the most striking aspect of the record is not necessarily the lyrics so much as Peat’s voice, with its remarkable ability to convey vulnerability, anger and defiance all at the same time.

[ Radie Peat on her first solo album: ‘Singing I don’t think about... it’s a totally emotional thing’Opens in new window ]

Those qualities bring an almost phantasmagorical edge to the music, so that a track about Irish nationalism, such as Liam Weldon’s Dark Horse on the Wind, is transformed into something ethereal and fantastical.

The obvious caveat is that No Human Tongue Can Tell is heavy going – suffocatingly so in places. Amid the unrelenting gloom, some listeners will wonder if it isn’t possible to have too much of a bad thing.

This is a glorious album. But afterwards I wanted to unplug my stereo, take a walk under blue skies and feel the sun in my eyes. That’s a testament to the power of Peat’s music. It’s a reminder, too, that, as with all strong medicines, your preferred dosage may vary.