RÚN - Rún

The debut from Irish experimental outfit Rún isn't easy material to parse without falling into obvious, and not always flattering, comparisons. The trio is made up of Tara Baoth Mooney, vocalist and performer, Diarmuid MacDiamarda, an occasional collaborator with Nurse With Wound, and drummer/sound engineer Rian Trench.

The press has already reached for quick comparisons to Swans and Big Brave, but the good news is there's much, much more going on across these nearly forty-five minutes of sonic deconstruction built from sludge, folk, noise, dark, metal and brutal riffs.

The single "Strike It" is harsh, a pagan mantra that, crying "unholy god", demands urgent answers for the horrors perpetrated within Irish religious institutions - horrors further confirmed in 2021 by investigations that documented acts of extreme cruelty at a mother-and-baby home in Tara Baoth's hometown. The track's crescendo is obsessive, cutting; music and human screams merge into an orgiastic ritual that exposes the inhuman hypocrisy of religion.

Rún's music is a relentless flow of lopsided riffs, vocal incantations, pagan folk, metal distortion, as well as impossible sonic marriages between harps, synths, rhythmic obsessions and even kraut-rock debris, all already packed into the seven minutes and twenty-seven seconds of "Paidir Poball (Pupil)". For Rún, terror isn't a narrative device - it's the telling of a submerged reality in which purity belongs to the voices doing the telling. The funk groove of "Your Death My Body" is as seductive as the sound of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Tara's voice is just as deceptive, at times as beguiling as Beth Gibbons, at times as diabolical as Diamanda Galas. The instrumental insights of "Terror Moon" are lucid and raw at once, a hard rock jam session flogged by tribal rhythms that slowly decomposes, pairing aseptic sonic putrefaction with the inhuman suffering of the Palestinian people.

Though drawing on mystical elements and psychedelic sounds, Rún stay rooted in reality: their debut is not an easy listen, but the trio's stylistically multifaceted, expansive nature is a source of ideas that feel at once familiar, original and disorienting. A blend of the sacred and the profane, of calm and fury, that finds its perfect exegesis in the closing "Caoineadh", a semantic evolution of drone music with placid tones that unsettles the soul and restores it through a breathtaking process of sonic reinvention.

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28/09/2025